While I’m on the topic of weird, in-between places, I might as well mention something else that happened during Thanksgiving weekend.

On Friday, I attended my high school’s 5-year reunion. It was held in the relatively quiet downstairs space of a pub in Harvard Square, which was probably the only reason I attended at all. (For the proximity, I mean, not the fact that it was at Tommy Doyle’s, which I would never go to by choice.) I arrived 45 minutes late, to a room of five people with whom I had exchanged roughly ten passing words throughout all four years of high school, and left 45 minutes later, just as the old cliques began to arrive in waves. Only one of my high school friends attended the reunion, and her arrival unfortunately coincided with my departure. (I actually had a train to catch, which I barely made.) She was the only person I hugged, with a genuine, back-crunching embrace. But we exchanged maybe six words.

My memories of my classmates had morphed fairly accurately into realistic expectations for their post-college selves, thanks to Facebook idling and the occasional grapevine-picking. Everyone looked and acted largely the same, at least to me. A had become shmoozier, yes, but he was also now the CEO of his own company and one of those guys with his social media-verse synced up to broadcast his every move. B was a paralegal and diplomatically expressed her discontent with her apple-pie smile. C was living at home and driving his parents insane. No big surprises. But I’m almost certain that not one of them recognized me, except for the one friend who made a belated appearance.

Of course, most of us believe that we change, or can change. We mature, gain perspective, acquire social graces and good taste. Maybe we learn how to dress ourselves and apply makeup, or say “fuck it” and toss away our dress shoes for good. Uniquely, I had spent most of high school wanting to be someone else, and after a few semesters of confused floundering in college, discovered that I didn’t need to. I clung to and kicked at my geeky Asian identity in a 98% white suburb, where my parents didn’t attend a single town meeting (nor have any clue when they occurred) and Friday nights were permitted for movies with my female friends, as long as the SATs weren’t right around the corner.

I’m certain that I wasn’t the only person at my reunion who’d traded glasses for contacts and learned to inhabit her awkwardness. (It’s only the subject of every shitty rom-com ever made.) It’s likely that my hyper-sensitivity to my classmates’ blank registration of my appearance — not one person said, “Hello, Connie!”, only enthusiastic “How are you?!“‘s — is evidence that I haven’t completely said “fuck it” to everything, that I still care somewhat about whether or not I ever existed in the isolated world of the WHS teenage social existence. I’d like to ascribe it to something more sublime, but frankly, it won’t make a lick of difference. Embrace your differences, as they say. Sometimes you really do just want a bite of cranberry sauce with your dumplings.