Are you still the same person you were 10 years ago?

It is so nice to sit at my desk and listen to Ben Lee, thinking to myself, what a beautiful world we all live in, I have been so many places, experienced so much, although “blissfully unaware of dangerous surroundings” would be an overstatement of my position today.

It is difficult to believe that some 12 years ago, I was running around with future music production stalwarts, ARIA award winners, numerous successful band and orchestra members and some meagre average musicians (myself included), yielding hand-held percussion instruments we raided from the music store room while our teacher was off crying in her staff-room, again.

I believe one male class-mate’s rousing rendition of “Simply The Best”, by Tina Turner was a show of the confusion the mid-90’s had for confused Jewish-private school-collegians (dare I ask), how a man can perform a song, by an undisputable diva, re-packaged to promote rugby league, following a bassoon concerto played by another student, bound for orchestral achievement was simply too much, even for the teacher, despite the student’s desperate attempts to reach out for anyone to listen to his misunderstood state.

Of-course singing Hare Krishna songs with these percussion instruments outside the Jewish Studies classroom also managed to highlight the wonderful disciplinary measures that can be taken by a Jewish school in today’s society.

On Saturday night, I had the distinct pleasure of attending my 10-year high-school reunion.

My previous thoughts before attending the promised gala event were along the lines of:
“I see everyone I would want to talk to anyway”.

This then migrated to:
“There will be a couple of people I would be interested in seeing”

Finally, I settled for:
“Maybe some people have actually changed”.

Well, after deliberation on attending, I even managed to send in an updated profile for our updated yearbook, with only limited smart-arse questions in it – Note, my favourite question was asked about who my high-school crush was, with my response eluding to losing all my former heart-throbs to the South African invasion. For some reason my responses were not published, the Moriah conspiracy against my family continues…

Arriving at the Paddington Bowls club, already warm from our pre-drinks session (who could have a Moriah function without pre-drinks), I was excited to get there, but then remembered that being a former student, on-time is early, so we just ended up at the bar for waiting there for everyone running late to get there on time.

I could dwell on the fact that our teachers weren’t invited (or were and didn’t attend) or the fact that non-kosher was a catering (and tastier) option, but choose not to.

My favourite observation were the people that had changed and had become “real”, these people were of all mixes. There were cool people who were now loners (from a school sense only), loners who were now cool and people who had clearly spent some time listening to Stan Zemanek or Alan Jones and were just telling it how it is.

I witnessed one guy try and pick up a girl and get knocked back without even realising it. I believe this specific instance was a weight related issue, but she was just being honest, and not trying to actually put him down.

I noticed that aging has graced some of us, but not all of us, but that is allowed after 10 years.

My favourite question was “So Rich, what do you do for a living?”, unfortunately I didn’t bring any business cards that I could lick and stick to my forehead before conversing with those people that I hadn’t seen in 10 years.

Despite everyone’s world travels, rites of passage-led university degrees and mandatory minimum of 3 days in Amsterdam to satisfy the rebel in all of us, we still have our inhibitions well and truly intact (once again, myself included).

I think for me there were only two real disappointments from the night.

I am not going to attend
For these people, I will preserve a real disappointment in their lack of attendance. In most cases, there were good reasons for not attending, another function on, living in another city, or in the worst cases, there were real painful memories of their attendance at our school. Some of these people were kind enough to put in responses about how much they had blossomed since leaving the school, I believe them, but I would have loved to have seen it.

The problem is, I still feel I am the traditionalist trapped in the good-Jewish boy body that used to put on the navy-blue kippah and was proud of his 12-minute record of leading a full morning prayers session as I had not studied for a Business Studies assessment and needed to sap knowledge from my fellow collegians. Change would have been welcomed and embraced by me.

I am still so fantastic

I noticed that some people hadn’t changed, and in most cases, this was a troubling phenomenon, there were a lot of people in my year that I liked and am still friends with. There were others who I didn’t like (assuredly I am sure there are no photos of me on their bedside table’s either).

But I reserve special mention for those who used the event to show everyone just how into themselves they actually are. I witnessed one person, who on numerous occasions gestured her importance by using her mobile as an excuse to get away from conversations with people, not worthy of her appearance, (I still see her do it outside of the reunion too). These people are happy, no doubt, I will never dispute that, but not unlike the ice-bergs floating off the coast of the South Island of New Zealand, no-one can really estimate how deep the ice goes beneath the surface.

A key observation was people were there who are happy, sad, satisfied and still crying out for help, have we changed that much in 10 years?

I don’t think so.