Reuniting is hard to do

The Experiment: Go to my five-year college reunion

Hypothesis:It'll be so great and I'll run into old friends and maybe reuinte with an old crush

Expected Outcome: Meaningful connections

For some reason, I decided to go to this thing. I sort of thought that it'd be fun. College was fun. The people were fun. Reunions, however, are NOT fun.

One of my major problems is that I never remember people. Almost every conversation I had this weekend went something like this.

Guy I've never seen before in my life: Hey! Crash Tester!
Me: Blank Stare
Guy: It's me, John Smith. We had like eight classes together.
Me: Um, OK.
John Smith: I dated your roommate Meredith, remember?
Me: I had a roommate named Meredith?

Apparently, I've forgotten everything that has happened to me in my life.

The reunion was semi-pathetic: a bunch of adults caught up in a manic fever to relive college in a compressed period of time. Mostly, it was just boring. Reunions are the kind of institutionalized group "fun" I never would have partaken of in college, which is probably why almost none of my college friends were there. Or maybe they were, and I just didn't remember them.

Also, I had nowhere to stay. I'm such a flake I didn't register or rent a dorm room like everybody else. Friday night I stayed with a darling couple who took pity on me and let me crash in their room (thanks so much, guys), but Saturday I had nowhere to sleep. The friends I thought I could stay with were determined to party all night, but I was emotionally and physically exhausted. I'd been up all week working on a seminar paper and spent the night before setting a record for most whiskey drunk by a non-alcoholic; now I was stuck confronting nostalgia and a healthy sense of insecurity all by myself. To make matters worse, I had gotten sick, lost my voice, and could barely rasp out the words, "I desperately want to go home."

So at two in the morning I went on a quest to find somewhere to crash. You would think most guys would be thrilled with a girl wandering up to them and saying, "Can I come home with you?" But when I tried this with some men I sort of know, they looked horrified. "I just need a patch of floor to bed down on," I told them. They almost keeled over from the awkwardness of the situation, and when I followed them back to the dorm, they acted so unbelievably uncomfortable I thought the world would end from the sheer force of their desire to get rid of me.

Luckily, just before the apocalypse of awkward, a friend called and said I could sleep on the floor of his dorm room. Where he wouldn't be. End result: two men I've never met before and I had a slumber party in my freshman dorm. This may or may not have made them uncomfortable, I was too tired to notice. Also, I learned what boys talk about with each other in the dark. They gossip about other boys.

On Sunday when I finally rolled into Penn Station I wept with joy to be back in New York. Instead of meaningful connections, I came home feeling lonelier than ever. Being alienated at home is easier to deal with, because I have TV, and at the very least I can call my mom and pick a fight with her. But being alienated three hundred miles away from my bed? It's too much.

Conclusion: I will not be at the tenth year festivities.