On this, the occasion of my twenty-year high school reunion…

(N.B. This is mostly written to the classmates I won’t see tomorrow night – it’s not particularly eloquent, but I wanted, in some way, to participate, even if from afar… )

Jesus… twenty years.

Tomorrow is my twenty-year high school reunion, and I won’t be there.

This is, by now, no longer unexpected, but I will say that up until about four months ago, I’d had every intention of going. I should also say (because a friend of mine truly thought this to be the case) that my decision not to go was not because I somehow thought it wouldn’t be fun.

I know it will be. It’s going to be a blast, and I really looked forward to seeing my classmates. And for anyone under the impression that I was miserable in high school and that this somehow would have kept me from coming, well… no.

For the record, I was never miserable at high school. SHS was a pretty awesome place to be. I suspect most of us now realize what an extraordinary place it was and what extraordinary people were there. That other things in my life were bad was totally outside the realm of what went on with you guys during the day.

No, I’m not going because we just moved to Germany a year ago, and my husband, toddler and I really deserve to be able to take a vacation and have some quality time together after a very stressful few years. We couldn’t afford both, and sometimes you just have to take care of business at home first.

I hope I’ll see you all in another five or ten years, depending on what comes together.

Still, though… if I were there… well, let’s pretend I am, shall we?

First of all, you’re all going to be off drinking on a boat, so I’d be all blurry, like so:

I’m pretty sure I’d also actually become more blurry after a few drinks, so that’s pretty accurate.

I’d want to know what you’d been up to and how your lives have gone in the past couple of decades, and in fact, I still do. I’d love to have the chance to talk for longer than a short Facebook exchange would allow, to laugh about the ridiculous and amazing things we all experienced together, and to finally find out what the name of that damned song Paul and Jed and Greg and Sean (maybe? I don’t remember) played at Showcase senior year that still gets stuck in my head anytime I think about it is.

I’d love to see where life’s journey has taken us all, good and bad, because I’m pretty sure that for most of us, it’s a completely different place than any of us imagined when we left school.

And if you wanted to know what has happened to me, well, here’s what I’d tell you (and my pensive thoughts about this are really the reason for this post tonight – I hope you’ll forgive my self-indulgence):

I went off to New Orleans for college because it was a free ride, continued studying music for the first year, and realized my skin was too thin and switched to Spanish. And then poli sci. And then chemistry. And then… oh, good lord, who knows. The last spin on the wheel of majors was history, and I dropped out in my last semester because I spent too much time playing computer games and got engaged to someone who was definitely Mr. Wrong. I wasn’t there to learn anyway. I was there to do all the stupid crap I should have gotten out of my system in high school.

Almost ruined my life during said engagement, got bailed out by friends and family, moved back to Milwaukee, got my shit together, became an au pair in Holland, and went back to finish up my degree at UWM, which is an underrated and truly fine institution. Learned to love Milwaukee again. Went to California to work for a bit, then off to Purdue for grad school in computer science. Met evil German person whom I despised because he was 1) a smartass, and 2) a smartass. Yes, I know, the irony is killing you.

And then I didn’t despise him. At all.

Moved in with said evil German person. Got a masters and switched to linguistics. Married evil German person and moved to L.A. without degree so he could finish his last year of his PhD, and worked for The Man.

Moved to Denver when said evil German was done with PhD where he became a professor, and I went back to my linguistics doctoral program (remotely) before getting pregnant with our now two-and-a-half-year-old son, Torsten, who rocks. Dropped program because my priorities and life changed and was a stay-at-home-Mom for two years.

Then left Denver, which is still a very cool place, and moved to Germany with evil German, where we now live in suburban Munich and love our lives. Husband and I both work at the Technische Universität München (TU-Munich) in the computer science department – I’m back to being a humble doctoral student and researcher in information security, though I am making pretty good use of my linguistic background as well. I like what I do.

Life’s pretty good, and we like living in Bavaria.

Otherwise, all that’s really changed about me is that I have much more hair (though half of it got cut off last week, which I am not pleased about), I got fat (fact of life), and while I still talk too much, I am much more sanguine about life than I ever was in high school and have the usual set of scars life gives you and very few regrets along with them.

That’s twenty years in a nutshell, I guess. I’m sure I left out vastly important things, but, eh, remember… you’re on a boat, you’ve been drinking, I look all blurry. You wouldn’t remember any more than that anyway.

There are lots of folks I didn’t know very well in high school that I should have gotten to know better, have gotten to know better through the power of social media, and I’d really have loved to have seen you tomorrow night. I still hope to have that chance. If you’re ever in Munich, you know what to do. And if not, well, there’s always 2015, or 2020, or for those of you still in Milwaukee, there’s whenever I can hop over the pond next. I hope it’s sooner rather than later.

Have a blast, guys – I expect to see lots of pictures and hear lots of stories

Also, do not fall off the boat.

No, seriously. The lake is still cold, I hear.

(And to get this off of my conscience: Meradith, I am still smacking myself for drinking too much beer at the 10-year-reunion such that I couldn’t figure out who you were. Deep cause of embarrassment. Sorry! And also for calling Jean Colleen. It was my first moment free of grad school and some rough family stuff and I was being just a little bit stupid