for better or worse, i generally know how maybe half my graduating class is doing these days. but due to the fact that i started facebooking five years ago while i was still an undergrad, i never really got that much distance from my high school classmates. it's the general presence of those regulars that make the mia's that much more illustrious.
while walking down my building's stairs and exiting onto the sidewalk, my thoughts leapt from approaching autumn to winter to alaska, snow and icebergs to here down the coast to southern california to frozen ocean.
a little over ten years ago my high school marching band was preparing to take a trip to southern california over the christmas holiday. during a band practice the director explained the trip itinerary included an afternoon at the beach. a plump, blond, simple girl who was new in town from texas raised her hand and asked, 'but if we go in december, won't the ocean be frozen?' the band director looked as though he'd gone slack-jawed and was then pressed between heavy dictionaries with tissue paper. he was an exceptionally thin man to begin with, but his interior rage at the blunt moronic-ness of the question seemed as though he would implode into a fairy twinkle, and then absolute nothingness. taking a moment to collection himself, the director asked for any other questions, invalidating the girl's query by ignoring its existence.
a 15 or 16 year old high school student asking whether the ocean nearest disneyland would be frozen in december would normally be a sign of a failed education system (i did note she had moved from texas), but this was the suburban midwest. as if any high school students anywhere need a reason to pick on others, this girl was already fat and from texas -- it was as if revealing her stupidity was the last straw in the argument of how could you possibly not pick on her?
from then on everyone referred to her as frozen ocean behind her back, at least in the beginning. it seemed so casual that it must have made it back to her at some point. the girl committed a massive social blunder and suffered extensive alientation -- it's one of those things you look back on, now as an adult, and think 'no wonder people end up fucked in the head.'
but that's not the point i'm getting at. even though this girl, this frozen ocean, had the odds stacked against her, she seemed to dig her own grave by thinking, or at least acting, as though her peers were her friends -- her desperation was so sad that no one really shunned her to her face. she seems like exactly the kind of person who would go on fb and friend anyone that was in her high school graduating class, and people would accept her request out of pity, knowing they could hide her from their own fb feeds. it's these aspects of this girl that i haven't seen in over ten years that make her absence from a social networking website so glaringly obvious.
so no, i don't want to attend my upcoming ten year high school reunion -- i want to know what the hell happened to frozen ocean.
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