High School Never Ends

Me in 9th grade... circa 1984

I belong to a super-cool, ultra secret club on Facebook. I'm risking my membership by talking about it here. Sssshhhhhhhh. Don't tell anyone.

I can't reveal the name, or the secret handshake.  But that little group of 31 people is so gosh-darn entertaining, I feel I must blog about it.

A high school friend of mine, who also happened to be a teacher, started the group. She started it because she wanted to have a place to vent, and since she was Facebook friends with a lot of her students, she felt like the topics she wanted to vent about (and perhaps some of the language she wanted to vent with) would not be appropriate for her students to read.

It's an "anything goes" kind of place.  Need to bitch about your boss?  Go right ahead.  Did your ex do something particularly stupid?  We've got your back here.  Fed up with your mother, your brother, the kids in the carpool?  Let it all out.

I think it's kind of awesome that, although only about half the members actually know each other, everyone supports each other.  For example, I invited a friend to join that no one else has ever met or knows.  She invited a friend that I've never met. And when that friend was going through a really hellish divorce and came to the "club" to vent about the latest stupid, insensitive thing that her soon-to-be ex was doing, everyone in the club sent words of encouragement, commiseration, and the occasional offer to bop the idiot over the head with a bat. 

It's that kind of club. Everyone should have one.

We have not one, but two resident geniuses who can write dirty limericks that will make you scream with laughter.  Everyone gets one on their birthday.  It's worth aging to get your very own, personalized, insult-laden limerick.

And we have several people who, when you really feel like you're overwhelmed and have no idea what to do -- are more than capable of giving you good, worthwhile, free advice.  Of course, that advice is riddled with curse words, but that's kind of the theme of the group. 

The other day, one group member put up a post asking how do you hack in to your child's Facebook account.  She was concerned that an older boy was sending inappropriate things to her very young teenage daughter.  She ended her post by saying something to the effect of, "does my daughter really think she's going to get away with this... I was a 14 year old girl myself once."  And before you know it, there were over 300 comments between that thread and a couple other spin-off threads.

We had so many posts we crashed our group's page.  It was a banner day.

The funny part is that, while the group did answer the posters original request, we ended up going completely off topic and sharing our stories of what we were all like as teenagers.

We covered it all: the bad hookups, ugly breakups, first drunks, first loves, first times...  We called each other out, we told on each other, we purged all of those memories in a gluttony of embarrassment and laughter.

It. Was. Awesome.

All the little hurts, the BIG embarrassments... they were discussed and, ultimately, laughed over. Our middle-aged selves realize that some (not all) of those horrible teenage moments just aren't that big of a deal when recalled in the light of day -- 20+ years later.

And another interesting thing happened.  In some of those posts, we healed. 

Two members admitted that they were a wee bit scared in high school of one of the other group members, for which she apologized.  Another group member confessed that she had been terrorized by a guy one of the other posters dated, and hopefully the girl who was terrorized took solace in the fact that the girl who dated that guy "accidently" ran over the big jerk with her car.

I'll give you three guesses who the driver of that car was...