Reunification

My ten-year high school reunion is coming up, and my apathy towards this means that if I were to opt in, I'd now have to pay the non-early-bird fee of $75 (or even $100) to attend. Plus the usual $33-plus-Metrocard-fare to get into the city. On the one hand, I suppose I'm well-enough-situated to go to this sort of thing, in that I am married, near the end of a PhD program, and not substantially worse-looking than I was at 17. Movies and sitcoms tell me that I ought to go to my high school reunion given those conditions. (Although I suppose being single would be an extra reason to go, in that you might meet an old flame. Especially with a math-and-science high school, I can't imagine anyone would go to a reunion to show off "accomplishments" like marriage or kids. Of course, not too many had high school sweethearts, either...)

I have not gone on to make a lot of money (to put it mildly), so there's that. But I'm a Stuyvesant success story by association, what with my husband's astrophysicist-ness. (That I've gone on to a grad program in the humanities probably owes something to my delight at a version of school that doesn't involve back-to-back periods of science.) Point being, I could go with my head held relatively high, and the normal reason not to go to reunions is a sense that you're not where you thought you'd be/imagine others would be at whichever age.

But the main reason not to go is that the main reasons to go are absent. I only just now left my hometown, so unlike the five-year reunion, which was fun because most had been away for college, this time around I've had years to keep in touch with, see at parties, or awkwardly run into, my classmates. NY is funny like that. Most of the class - those who made a go of some career and those in the proverbial parental basement alike - probably lives there.

But more to the point, there's Facebook. Not only has Facebook told me, over the years, everything I've wanted to know and more (thank you, "hide" function) about said classmates. I can see, on the event page on Facebook, who's attending. I can see what each of those people have been up to, what they now look like. And this is a high school whose grads (and, no doubt, current students) are all on the site. One of my classmates is even employed there and in Zuckerberg's inner circle, which I know thanks to guess which site. On account of Facebook, there are no surprises.

So, readers who have faced the reunion-in-the-age-of-Facebook dilemma. Is it still fun to go to one of these things when there are no surprises? Or are there surprises, because online everyone's putting their best selves forward? I have until Friday to decide.