In my high school batch's egroups exchange,
one of the guys points about our apparent lack
of sensitivity. Vic says:

[I] just read your messages and
ganun pa rin lahat: Same
characters, maturity in certain aspects.
But if the idea of this group is for some
of you to show off and for some of us
to be ashamed of ourselves, the objective
of re-acquaintance will not work.

He is of course correct. High school was a
hell's quest for popularity, and the majority
of us weren't the movers and shakers, and
were made to feel pathetic for not wearing
the right brand of clothes, the hip hairstyle
of the moment, for not having the agility or
the clever one-liner to throw back. It was
like passing through one giant cookie
cutter where you all looked the same,
thought the same, with the occasional
rebel who was willing to answer back to
the teachers and yell "To hell with everybody!"

When you think about it, one cannot almost
comprehend the rationale for holding reunions
except to further perpetuate the cult of
popularity. Reunion is hell for those who
were once popular and the once prodigies who
never amounted to anything more than what
was expected of them. With nothing but old
gloss to draw from, memory comes in handy.
This is where the proliferations of
"remember whens" begin. Past glories are
dug and dressed up with nostalgia, to liven
up the nothingness that permeates our
mundane, daily lives.

And those who have risen up the social ladder,
those whose cuteness factors had escalated
compared to the diminishing hairline of the former
crush ng bayan, now is the time for revenge.