Should I go to my high school reunion?

So we were minding our own business on our laptop a few weeks ago, working on our second book (we've come into some turbulent writer's block lately, it makes us want to slam our head on the table a few times to jump start our imaginations) when we got an email. Not any email, but the all-too-cheerful "It's been 10 years; it's time for our high school reunion!!!!" mass email.

Ugh.

Not that we didn't have fun in high school. We had many Wonder-Years-meets-Saved-By-The-Bell moments from those four years. But that's just it. They were only four years of our ever-amazing life, where nothing particularly noteworthy happened (if you don't include watching your best friend get hit in the face with a baby carrot that came flying across the quad at lunch one day, courtesy of a varsity baseball player out for blood who apparently had terrible aim in his attempt to hit the surfer near us. Needless to say we don't think the guy ever made it to the pros.) Oh and also high school was where we first met J freshman year through our best friend (the best friend that later got dinged by the flying, killer carrot). We were good friends with J for almost two years until we thought it'd be funny to play a nasty (but funny) prank on him that involved trash in his backpack and well, that was the end of that friendship (until he found me 8 years later. But that's the Story of Us, not this.) Confession: We loved playing mischievous pranks on everyone back then.

Other than that high school was a blip for us. A blip that happened 10 years ago, and that we really have no ties to (we stopped talking to all our friends from high school right around the time we graduated and realized -- while taking college English courses at night our senior year -- that people in college were so much more open-minded, intelligent, and cooler. People who actually cared about the classes they took? Oh, the novelty of such an idea.)

We suppose the best way to make a decision about this alleged reunion looming ever larger on the horizon would be doing the mature thing. We're going to make a list of reasons for and against, like adults do. (Adults do this ... right? *crickets.*) Pressing forward...

Reasons to attend reunion:

Hrm. Nothing comes to mind at the moment. Drawing a blank.

...

Still blank...

Oh yes, J wants to go. Don't ask us why.

Reasons to not attend reunion:

• Tickets are $65. Yup, $65, which means for the two of us it would be a 130 bones. Not that we couldn't afford it, but personally when I see $65 I don't automatically think "Oooh, oooh! I can't wait to run out and buy my reunion ticket!" which, now that I think about it, probably doesn't include anything more than a two-drink ticket minimum and regret. Yes, regret. Why? Because when I see $65, I think 10th-row seats at a Rush concert, not "high school reunion".

• No offense to anyone attending, but they're basically strangers to us. Why pay $65-$85 (depending on when tickets are purchased) to hang out with a bunch of people we didn't care about 10 years ago, much less now?

• With the advent of Facebook there is no point for reunions anymore. We can all see what we're up to and how many babies and husbands and affairs each of us has had, so there's no element of surprise in guessing who might have invented Post-Its, or what that nerdy Sandy Frink-esque guy in computer class ended up doing with his life. All that info's online.

If there's one thing we've learned since high school, it's that we had much too brash and saucy of a personality to have ever gotten through those four years without being misunderstood more than once. And we feel at any reunion we'd be misunderstood once again. Like some fascinating hybrid of Daria and Quinn Morgendorffer (it is possible to be both, we were living proof), we strutted through our four years under many guises:

The "Clueless" phase: We remember the very first time we saw Clueless, kind of like when people remember where they were when Kennedy was shot. It was 8th grade, we went with one of our (then) best friends and her mom to Cinema 9 in downtown Santa Cruz. It took mere minutes until I was completely, utterly hooked. A revolving closet! The ability to manipulate teachers' love lives for higher grades! And the plaid, oh the plaid! We were just coming off our "My So-Called Life" phase so the pleated plaid mini-skirts were an excellent transition from our Kurt Cobain-esque flannels to something more prim and ladylike. We stocked up on these and short babydoll tees with plaid hearts embroidered on the chest. Fashionable things like that. Oh and this phase is what also kicked off our love for chunky disco-style platforms that we'd wear with our skirts and tees to school for some God-awful reason, as though we were attending a rave at 8:40am on a Tuesday, tottering across the parking lot from the school buses in the coastal fog. We were so cool.

The hippie phase: We foolishly thought our freshman year that we were, in fact, a direct reincarnation of John Lennon himself. (Don't ask, we have no idea. All we know is there were many birkenstocks, flower head wreaths and coke-bottle sunglasses to be had.) We felt grossly misunderstood by the general public.

The Aaliyah phase: Herein we dropped our hippie duds for more BET-style garb. It was sophomore year, when Missy Elliot in her inflated trash bag outfit was so cool and it was totally normal for WASPy kids to act like they knew exactly what kind of hardships Tupac rapped about in "All Eyez On Me". In a foolish attempt to be as amazing as Aaliyah, we too donned baggy, ill-fitting cargo pants kept up by drawstring, tiny tank tops, silver wire armbands, and lots of glitter makeup on our eyelids (that clear goop from Claire's with the overstated glitter flecks, don't pretend you don't know exactly what we're talking about.) In this phase we listened to lots and lots of rap, hip hop, soul, and pretty much anything that was considered "hood", was featured on "Yo! Mtv Raps", or had ties to either Keith Sweat or 112. (Note: We still listen to hip hop, but back then we didn't yet have the refined palate for music that we have today. Back then owning "Mtv's Party to Go" cds made us very, very cool in our book.)

The rockabilly/punk phase: Following our love affair with black and white camo, we decided that rockabilly everything was amazing after checking out a punk show downtown with friends. So we tossed our baggy cargo pants for tight, straight-legged, dark denim jeans (cuffed at the bottom, of course), bought faux "nerd" glasses and a pair of black leather shoes with red leather flames on the toes, only listened to punk and ska, and swore by anything affiliated with James Dean, "Rebel Without a Cause", and leopard print. Our favorite thing to do was go downtown with friends every weekend to check out punk and ska shows and now that we think about it these formative years were what shaped much of our musical tastes today.

And somehow, after all those extremes, we ended up finding ourselves our first year of college and never looked back. Now we are (seemingly) normal at first glance. But for us, that was high school in a nutshell.

What were you all like in high school? Was I an anomaly or was it also a time for you to dabble in different identities, trying to find the best one? Bottom line: Would you go to your 10-year reunion?