My five year reunion for high school is coming up this year (five years already!) and I'm not particularly enthralled. Five years is a fair chunk o' life and now I'm sort of expected to go and justify my time to people I don't know particularly well. Still, it's not that far removed from extended family events.

Luckily, there is a compelling reason to attend the reunion. I want to see what happened to the cool group at school. Don't worry, I wasn't bullied particularly badly at school, and I have no wish to smugly brandish my Life's Direction (which is pretty weak anyhow) at jittery former classmates. But I am intensely interested in the process of being cool, and whether it is true that being too cool too early wrecks the rest of your life. My interest was piqued when I ran into a former classmate at a dodgy local poolhall. She used to be well in the cool group. The conversation unfolded as follows. She: What's been happening Doug? I babble something about uni, feeling vaguely inadequate about doing an Arts-related course. I return the serve - And what about you?
She: Oh, I've taken too many drugs and my head's fucked. Wow. What an opening line. What honesty. And it's not just her; I've heard worse through the few gossipers who still keep the concept of 'yearlevel' alive. One guy drove home after a night out, buzzing on a nice little speed/ecstasy cocktail, rolled his car on a corner and came to as he was being loaded into the ambulance. Scared of losing his licence, he waited till the ambo's were facing the other way before bolting out the door.

There's a couple of druggies who've become dealers (at least they're moving up the food chain). But what about the others? There's more to the story, I'm sure.