Unsorted College Reunion Bits

• There is such a thing as a "warm acquaintanceship."  I didn't know this at my 5th year reunion.  I thought that if I genuinely liked and respected someone, one or both of us should feel guilty that we hadn't been in touch, and we should apologize and make amends and resolve to be active and friendly participants in one another's lives.  I don't feel that way anymore.  There are people I think are great, and am delighted to know, and can have meaningful and challenging conversations with, and wish all kinds of good things upon, and feel easily myself with, and know I won't lift a finger to see again.  That's okay.  If our paths cross or circumstances conspire to bring us together, wonderful.  If not, it's nobody's fault.  I hope to see them again in 5 more years.  No need to promise or demand more.

• One of my buddies started a hedge fund and is now managing more than $500 million.  Universities give him their money to manage.  It is mind boggling.

• A classmate manufactures these, and was giving them away. 
• I snuck into three separate secret societies that I didn't belong to over the weekend, pretending to be an alumna.  At Wolf's Head someone got suspicious and demanded that my friend and I "Sing the song!  Come on, you remember it, don't you?  Are you sure you were a Wolf?  Sing the song!"  My cell phone started ringing right when we were being accused and we used it as the excuse to make a quick escape.  It turned out that my accomplice had dialed my number with his hands in his pockets.  A brilliant getaway.  I also got into the courtyard of Skull and Bones, and had a surprisingly creepy experience climbing up this tower within their courtyard.  I chickened out of going and mingling in the tent with all the crusty old guys.  It's one thing to piss people off in a prank, but these particular people run the NSA and the State Department and who knows what else.  I don't want to get on any blacklists.  I now have a good plan for getting in at the next reunion, though.  We'll see who's telling whom to "sing the song!"
• I finally ate here, a place I'd never been as an undergraduate.  I was there at 2 AM, for good measure.  It was about an equal mix of townies and reunion Yalies.  The burgers were worth the wait.
• I thought buildings across campus were soooo far away when I was an undergraduate.  I can't imagine how I could have been so lazy. Everything I remembered as prohibitively distant was an easy walk. 
• I was featured on a Harvard economics examination, I learned.  A young professor there decided to use my name on his exam.  He made me the head of Wharton business school.  The exam went something like this, "Your friend Scheherazade, dean of Wharton, asks you to look into the following problem...."  I demanded my name appear on all exams from now on. 
• Three separate people who I knew in very different contexts while an undergraduate told me they remembered my writing.  One of them pulled up details from a piece I wrote freshman year and said he'd always remembered the strength of the imagery, and described it all back to me.  One of them said, "I think you took pretty good advantage of Yale while you were here, but I never understood why you didn't write more.  It was always clear that you were good at it, and that that's what you should have been doing.  I was always disappointed that you didn't pursue that here."  Another said, I always expected that you were going to write a book.  All three got really excited when I told them I had decided to try to write.  (Those three interactions alone would have made the trip worthwhile.)
• There were fewer anorexics at the 10th reunion than at the 5th.  On the other hand, four of the anorexics at the 5th weren't here at the 10th, so it's not clear whether they've gotten better or if they were just out of sight. 
• All these 7-15 month old kiddoes that my classmates are running around after are pretty damn cute.  They look like fun.
• Southern New England gets hot and sultry in a way that Maine almost never does.  That sticky humidity makes me powerless, irritable, helpless, and lethargic. 
• One of the guys in my residential college who never sailed while in college discovered sailing in graduate school and is now a serious Star racer who travels all around to regattas.  I never in a million years would have guessed that he would be the guy I would be talking sailing with at the reunion. 
• The most politically conservative woman in our class, who lived a floor below me freshman year, is now working in the White House, deciding who should be nominated for federal judgeships. 
• I went to a lecture about the homosexualization of American modern art in the postwar era, specifically about Jasper Johns and Rauschenberg by this guy. It was extremely good -- graspable by an art ignoramus like me, but fast paced and sophisticated enough that I could only stay caught up by applying concentrated full attention to the lecture.  It has been a very long time since something has been deeply engaging and hard, just hard enough to captivate me and reward me for keeping up, not so hard that it passed me by and left me discouraged or distracted.  I went to a lecture about innovation by this guy, and it was somewhere on a spectrum between indulgently fluffy and patently shallow and stupid.  Are business school classes just inherently fluffy, or did he think he had to talk down to us alums?
• Staying up until 3 isn't something I want to do every night.

Comments

[Eleanor]

It strikes me that you had some posts before the reunion that were about how you wanted to appear to your classmates: things you needed to do before the reunion (lose weight, find a stunningly handsome foreign-accented husband, etc.). But after the reunion you just wrote about the fantastic experiences you had! It makes me think I shouldn't worry as much about how I look or what others will think of me when I go to my reunions.

[PG]

I thought buildings across campus were soooo far away when I was an undergraduate. I can't imagine how I could have been so lazy. Everything I remembered as prohibitively distant was an easy walk.

It also might be the difference between having to get to classes and other mandatory events on a daily basis, and dawdling along to voluntary stuff for one weekend.