Friends 4 Ever
Last week, on the day after Thanksgiving (or "Sparring Day," as I like to call it), I got together with a pretty big group of my friends from high school. We were all theatre geeks together, and we've kept in touch fairly well -- we even have our own Yahoo! group to make that just a bit easier.
At one point or another in high school, it seems just about all of us dated one another, so we're really close. And not in a strange, ooh, this is so awkward -- he's seen my boobs! way. In fact, if anything, it usually means we feel that much more free to talk about just about anything and everything with one another, and it makes the time we spend together that much more meaningful and memorable.
It got me thinking again about something that Matt said at one of our get-togethers several years ago, and which has always stuck with me. In a nutshell, he was saying that -- while everyone always says that the friendships you make in college are the most meaningful -- for him, it was his high school friends that he felt were the ones he'd keep for the rest of his life. As soon as the words were out of his mouth, they were cemented in my psyche. I've always known that to be true, even if conventional wisdom has stated otherwise. (Who am I to stick with conventional wisdom, anyway? In Roget's, the top antonym for popular lists my name.)
[Tangent: Is this a Mars/Venus thing? I wonder if Matt and I feel this way because we were never high school girls.]
I take this theory further for the purposes of this post, though. I met Lisa and Aimee when we were only just teenagers, yet I still feel more connected with them than I do with most of the friends I made in college. We've kept in touch and genuinely cared about what is going on in one another's lives ever since Science Camp. Each of us really knows what makes the other tick. We can make each other laugh because there's a tacit understanding between us. We can have a conversation that is really just a continuation of all of the other thousands of conversations we've had in the past.
It rocks.
That's, I guess, why you should read this blog.
posted by embiggened @ 3:56 PM
1 comments
1 Comments:
I have to agree. I feel much closer to my high school friends than most of the people I knew in college, and I think part of it might be that I didn't have as much in common with the vast majority of them (we were in marching band together, but everyone else's backgrounds and majors were so vastly different that when you take band out of the equation, there wasn't as much to relate to).
Maybe it's because of the age we were when we were in high school and college... High school is such a transitional period, a series of milestones, and I think the people you share those milestones with are automatically endeared to you forever. Also I think we romanticize the past a little bit, remembering how young and innocent we were and wishing we could be that way again. As a society, especially, high school is constantly being revisited in television and movies and I for one can't get enough ("Freaks and Geeks" especially). I just think the people you knew then have almost grown up with you like siblings would, and there's an indelible familiarity and affection for those people (and conversely, have you noticed the tendency to be as intimidated by-- and remember the names of-- the popular people who snubbed you then?). "Romy and Michele's High School Reunion" is an awesome example of all of those emotions that get stirred up among that certain group of people.
Aimee has always loved the movie "Indian Summer" because of its story of kids who went to camp together and reunite at the camp in their 30s (I mean, doesn't it sound like something we would have come up with?). She and I agree that we share an incredible bond through Science World, and I know it's because we shared the same milestones that summer-- being away from home alone for the first time, realizing that boys might actually like us, and making close friends outside of the familiar circle at home. Aimee has always maintained she's going to send Emma and Tyler to camp... are you planning on sending Brett and Alexa?
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