cheap fogey

Approximately one billion years ago I signed up for one of those high school websites - you know the ones, where you enter your info and the school you went to so you can keep in touch with old friends and whatever? [I refuse to link to any of them or pay them any lip service] At the time it was ok, namely because it was free. I swapped email addresses with a few people that I was glad to have found posted there and that was cool. But then the website started charging money to view profiles and email addresses and what-not and so I abandoned it. Basically, it was a cute toy when it was free, but the price tag made it totally uninteresting.

Now I have found out that my name is listed on EVERY high school big-brother-is-tracking-you type of website, along with just about everyone else in my class. I'm sure it's a data feed from somewhere, but my email address/log-in info has been passed along, too. Now that it's been 10 calendar years from my h.s. graduation, I am getting BOMBARDED with emails from these sites, trying to get me to participate in their reunion tracking program - and if I am interested, I can hire one of their recommended event planners (ha!*). So if you happen to see my name on one (or all) of those lists, please don't think that I am an uber-geek who is desperate to know exactly who is attending the reunion.

Plus, this gives me the Part 2 dilemma : attending the reunion itself. For years, I thought that I would go - that I'd want to go. But now as it draws closer, I'm not really all that interested. Is that terrible? I know people who do want to go, because now they are thin/successful/rich and want to show it off and I know people who don't want to go for all the same reasons. So far the breakdown for me is :

• looking at the aforementioned websites, I am hard-pressed to remember most of the people listed!
• I keep in touch with a lot of people from h.s.
• 99% of the people from h.s. that I don't actively keep in touch with I can find with my own 6-degrees of separation game
• I don't really have an engaging tale to tell about my successes/triumphs/weight loss and I don't know if anyone is buying the "I invented Post-Its" routine anymore
• respondants to my survey say that if they did go, they only were glad to see 1 or 2 people and of those who did not go, they say that they didn't want to sleep with anyone who was going, so what's the point. I also do not want to have sex with anyone who might go, so what's the point?

*In case you missed the humor, I am an event planner - this is how I earn my millions.