High school confidential

First, updates: My parents stood in line for 3+ hrs and Noah and I joined them for the last one. So he’s immunized and it should take effect in another week. I hear the lines are shorter now, but it is a relief that it’s done. It’s not that my forebrain thinks it’s a zombie plague and death to all. It’s that my hindbrain is fully engaged all the time in not losing Noah.

I have booked an appointment to discuss the shiners. I do think it’s allergies; I’m just not clear on what they are or where the symptoms might appear.

Mr. Bada seems to have decamped lately, perhaps to serve for another family. I’m just enjoying sitting where I like.

~~

So tonight I went down to my old high school. I’d missed the 20th reunion but it was graduation there today. (They have a strange ritual of making all the grade 12s come back in November to get their diplomas, which is the same as it was the year I graduated.) One of my friends from high school died, and so we established a minor prize in her name, and every year the school asks our class to send someone to present the prize. So this year, on a whim, I said yes.

It was interesting; first of all I had to sit on the stage and look out at the audience, and that brought with it memories of failed auditions, successful musical performances, and a speech or two. But secondly the whole thing was very… kind. I would say, even warm. And when I went to this particular private school, it was many things but kind and warm were not among them.

In my day, kidlets, the phrase unconditional love was reserved for the therapy you had to do after the teachers nailed your ass to the wall. And I am not really kidding.

(Also, all the kids were beautiful. What the hell? Is it the water? The love? I am sure we did not look that way.)

I really do think that Douglas Coupland nailed a few things about Generation X, and one of those things is the kind of rugged individualism + cynicism + quiet longing that came about during that time when parents seemed on the surface often not to give all that much of a shit about their kids’ inner lives and it seemed like every single week someone else’s parents were announcing their divorce and we were exchanging tales of what the media would eventually frame as “latchkey kids.”

I can pretty much guarantee that despite the strains of Marlo Thomas playing in the background somewhere in one’s hazy preschool days, 80 per cent of my graduating class would have been either mortified or deeply cynical if a principal had mentioned unconditional love.

I in fact instantly texted (take that, you Gen Y networkers!) one of my peers to confirm this hunch and she agreed. Things were not that touchy feely and it would have been mortifying.

It reminded me of reading the section in Buy Buy Baby about Gen X mothers because although I don’t think I’ve entirely drunk the Baby Einstein Kool-Aid, it is true that I see my job as basically being plugged into my child’s experience. And the part about popular culture being more “there” than the family and the love-hate relationship I have with it as a result is… yeah, ok, I would have to say there’s something there, although for me personally it would have been more popular fiction than television.

Anyways, the experience was kind of mindblowing, but it also makes me hope for Noah’s future, that schools perhaps also are populated with members of Gen X who are trying to make things, you know – better.

Not that I think the phrase “unconditional love” belongs in a graduation address. Ahem.

Also, I identified more with the parents than with the students at the thing. Welcome to midlife.

And now I want to make someone who’s about 19 read Ordinary People and see what they think of it.