tales from an ordinary world

2000-03-17

"hey hey hey
look at me now
I'm unrecognizable
my trademark frown
is gone
and replaced by this easy smile..."
Lloyd Cole.

So I gave up the promise of green beer on St Patrick's day to go to a 10-year high school reunion. Faces were familiar, but many of the names had left my head. Still, hardly anybody recognized me. I always like to think that I've managed to change myself a fair bit over the past 10 years, but it's still odd to be actually confronted by the realisation that I may well have actually done it.

Much of the conversation was the usual slightly nervous "so, what do you do these days ?", although I did end up talking at lengh with one guy I'd only vaguely known back then, about the world of IT and the onslaught of technology. We were having a smoke outside, watching all the people inside, and he asked me "have you ever taken acid ?" "No, unfortunately not." "Well," he replied, "this is kind of like that."

One of our number had gone onto a career in politics (unsurprisingly), and his gift of speech enabled him to give a fairly entertaining talk about our times. I remember back then, on the school bus, he'd go on to me about how great a man Gough Whitlam was. I'd nod and smile - I wasn't that interested in politics then (only slightly less so now), but I humoured him anyway, because he was interesting to listen to.

After we were shown around the new $4 million pool they'd constructed since we left, we were led up to an "archives" room, where they had all sorts of random objects to remember days gone by. A yearbook from our final year (1990) was there, and somebody found a picture of myself and Scott, cheering on someone or other at some athletics meet. I hardly recognized myself.