The Good Old Days Weren't Always Good

I've been thinking about my school days quite a bit the past 6 months.  I credit this to a number of things:

1. my 20th high school reunion was this past Thanksgiving
2. Prince #2 attends pre-school at the local vo-tech and I get to talk to high-school girls 3 times per week. It seems that they think I'm "really cool", something high school girls never thought I wa
3. Allison keeps posting things about the 80s and her school-girl days and it brings back memories
4. The best friend of my high school boyfriend recently "signed" my Guestbook on Classmates.
5. Prince #1 has social issues that we are working on (and that are part of his Autism) and with which he has made progress.  However, if he doesn't get some of them worked out pretty soon, it's going to be harder and harder for him to make friends

I've sat and thought about it (actually, I was naked and in the shower scrubbing the hard-water stains out of the grout...same thing really) and I have tried to figure out why, 20 years later, I still obsess over things that happened in high school.  

Why is it that I still feel bad about cheating on my high school boyfriend, but don't feel the least twinge of guilt over cheating on another one 3 years later?  Both were pretty decent guys....both didn't deserve what I did to them....both reacted badly.  Yet if you held a gun to my head, I couldn't give you the last name of the 2nd one?

Why is it that when I went to my high school reunion, I still sought some sort of approval from the "popular girls", even when I realized after talking to them, that many of them are the exact same sort of women that I blog about (bitchy & snotty SAHMs)?  Why do I have great empathy for the women in my Weight Watchers class (yes - I'm starting back on Tueday - that's a whole other story), but if one of "those girls" from high school was in my WW group, I would silently snicker at how fat she was?

What's more, why do I give a shit about things that happened more than half my life ago? 

But then I realized something.  My 39th birthday is in two weeks and from there it will be just a short hop to the Fuck-You-40s.  Life is too short to keep thinking about these things...so let's have a little fun with it and then we shall never think or speak of these things again!

I think that I obsess over these things because I am hoping that I will bump my head at my next reunion while wearing a silver dress and be transported back to my high school years....having all the knowledge and experience that I have now and using that to solve those vitally important high school problems (for those of you who are younger - that's a reference to "Peggy Sue Got Married")

.....like being called a copycat because I had the nerve to buy a chartreuse Forenza v-neck shaker sweater when QueenBeeBitch already had one.  Yeah - because NOBODY wore clothes from The Limited in the mid-80s and certainly not those v-neck sweaters with leggings and matching socks tucked in to our high-topped Reeboks!

....like not having the good sense to realize that a relationship was no longer working and that it was time to cut our losses and date other people.

....like realizing (edited because it is about me wanting to screw my brains out with a few choice guys from high school,. but my father found this blog and I don't want to give him a heart attack.) Who cares about a high school reputation when you are likely to never see those people again and by the time you do, things like "she had SEX" aren't such a big deal any more?

....like realizing that the "office ladies" are not a bunch of losers and that just because someone is 20 years older than me doesn't mean that they can't still make their car shake from driver-dancing to Boys Don't Cry

[youtube=http://youtube.com/watch?v=iQhh4Xs8RcM]

So if you could step in to a way-back machine and go back to high school...what would you change?