sept! dix!

June 2007 will mark the 10th anniversary of our graduation from high school and our fellow ex-classmates have started to gather up everybody's contact info for an upcoming reunion. Contacts keep coming in, long lost friends are found and many souvenirs along with them. I'm surprisingly enthusiastic about it! There's a lot of people I can't wait to catch up with (given that someone might be generous enough to organize the damn thing to begin with) and of course many I'm not too eager to see but that goes both ways, it's normal. It's not as relevant as it was back then anyway, there's this general clean slate feeling going 'round and that's a welcomed vibe. 1997 was still sorta early in the "internet age" (and I can't help but wonder how easier any research assignments would've been if I had access to google back then, damn I'm old) so no one really exchanged any emails or websites back then but here I am today adding tons of old contacts on my various messengers thinking "wow, he/she's online!" and everything/everyone is that much more accessible now. It's very odd but it's lots of fun. I made a pact with a close friend of mine (who's also part of this reunion) that we would make an effort to go out of our "clique" circles (or comfort zones, if you will) and try to catch up with people we weren't that close to back in the day. Aside from reuninting with ex-friends, it seems kinda pointless to experience a gathering if you're not gonna (re)discover faces from the past. At the time this reunion should take place, I'll be closer to where I was ten years ago as well. There was a time when I could vent that I "made it", in the sense that I don't necessarily have a job per say but I still manage to pay the bills (this is still true) -- it's one hell of a (self-appointed) roller coaster (I'm in one steep slump right now) and it hasn't always been easy (you won't really know what it's like 'til you've tried it, as one my friends recently found out) but it has ALWAYS been rewarding. I'm just not certain if I can claim "victory" anymore. I have to weigh it out when I get back there, keep the eye on the prize (a plan I can't wait to work on). So by then, I'll be hand-in-hand with several different reunions -- they keep saying that time flew by real fast but I don't think so, the pacing seems perfect from my perspective.