IN WHICH FACETHING PREEMPTS MY HIGH SCHOOL REUNION
I was looking at the very large list of people whom Facething suggests I be friends with, which was composed almost entirely of people I had gone to high school with. Looking only at this matrix of too-close and/or off-center photos of faces attached to names with some phrase almost always stuck in the middle in place of whatever, likely perfectly reasonable, middle name their parents gave them, filled me with a sort of embarrassment, not for them and the fact that they apparently go by names like "Deep Sleprivation" now, but for me. I had forgotten how awkward I was in high school, which I imagine is a result of my present awkwardness clouding my memory (how could I possibly have been more awkward than I am now?), but while outwardly I looked exactly the same as I do now, inside I was gangly and covered in acne, with glasses an inch thick. Or, that's my memory of it, anyway. The point is that I felt the same heart-racing, nervous embarrassment that I would feel if I actually encountered any of these people in real life, which will probably be six years from now when I'm standing uncomfortably against the wall in some hotel ballroom explaining what an exoplanet is and why they're useful to find, and of course why I'm still in school. I wouldn't be embarrassed about any of those things in particular, but I know for a fact that anyone I talk to would be thinking, and may very well say, "Ahh, well, that's typical Laura." And I don't want them to think that, because it will have been ten years since I'd graduated high school. I'd be twenty-seven. I'd be twenty-seven and they'd still think of me as a seventeen-year-old.
Why do people ever go to these things? Are there people who don't have these anxieties?
Why do people ever go to these things? Are there people who don't have these anxieties?