School Reunions - To Go or Not to Go

I've been participating in Dave Vinton's blog about his class reunion, and I wanted to further explore the topic here.

He and other bloggers advise that I go to my 10-year reunion (not till 2009) because people change in 10 years. They say these changes are good and bad, so I suppose that means some get fatter (I'm definitely one of those), some get skinnier, some get better looking (hopefully me again . . . haha), some people's looks regress, etc. And while I am sort of curious about how people look and what they've been doing, I also feel as though not enough time has passed.

Granted, it'll have been a decade (geez, that makes us sound old!) but personally, I don't even feel like I've accomplished much since graduation. Oh, I've done what many people may have done - graduated from college, found a job, living on my own and whatever else one can do in 10 years - but I feel like at the core, I'm still that 18-year-old kid that was happy to finally get out of high school. All the hopes and dreams, the I-can-conquer-the-world feeling I felt then is still with me.

Also, I wonder about if going to your high school reunion somehow makes you revert to how you were in high school. These are the people who saw you all snotty-nosed and zit-faced. Ok, well maybe I'm exaggerating. But they are the ones who were with you when you went through a lot of changes - physical, mental and emotional - and this is probably how they remember you. Do you fall back into your stereotypical niche once you step foot back on the metaphorical campus? Or does the 10 years spent as your "real self" away from the high school peer pressures and preconceived notions win out in the end?

When I was in school, I had a core group of friends but wouldn't say it was a clique (although there was plenty of that going on too). I wasn't in the popular crowd, by all means, but I wasn't at the bottom rung of the social ladder either. I think this has to do with what you participate in throughout your life. For instance, I played soccer growing up so I knew the "jocks." I took two years of band in intermediate school (it was either that or chorus and you don't want to hear me sing) so I knew some "band geeks." I took some AP classes so I knew the "brainiacs." And everyone takes PE and Health, so I knew everyone some people in between.

When you go to your class reunion, are we still relegated to these stereotypes? Or do people see you as you are now and not who you used to be?