June 7: Welcome to the Bigs

High school graduations are among us. Another crop of young students are walking across stages all over the country. They're shaking hands with principals who have no idea who they are. Nine years ago, I went through the same routine. I waited in the blistering sun wearing my dark blue cap and gown and waited for my name to be mispronounced by the master of ceremonies only to shake the hand of a lady who acted like she knew me and was thrilled that I had made it.

I waited in that sun with seven hundred other graduates. Some of us would go on to do great things within the last nine years. Others, like myself, would accomplish absolutely nothing. The sky was the limit, though, on that hot June morning. We had accomplished the first step to achieving that future we all deserved.

As hot as it was that morning, it was a somber one as well. Childhood friends were saying goodbye. The people we saw every day for years would soon be in a different part of the country. For those of us that were moving away for college, we would soon be forced to find a new clique to be a part of. We would make new friends and create new memories in our new cities. At least we would have our ten-year reunion, right?

Wrong! I wasn't sucked into the Facebook vortex until my senior year of college, but since that fateful day of celebration (people at my school were literally ecstatic at the idea of our school being accepted to the Facebook universe) the social networking website has completely stripped all of the fun from the inevitable ten-year reunion.

From the moment Chapman University was considered cool enough to be added to the network of colleges, I started getting friend requests from some of my closest friends from high school. Because it had only been three years since I had seen a lot of them, there wasn't a lot of shock upon seeing updated pictures of them.

There is, however, the occasional friend that has found me more recently after all of these years and more times than not, I'm disgusted at his or her transformation. Kids that I once played soccer and little league with look like they could eat me. I've never seen so many chins in my life. Rolls and rolls of fat have appeared from nowhere to suffocate the images of my long, lost friends.

Now, it's virtually impossible for me to judge how I look now compared with how I looked then because I see myself every day. It's like when you hang out with a friend and his hair gets longer and longer and you don't notice until he cuts it off, but I honestly don't think I look that different. I'm still the skinny, white geek I was on that hot June morning in California. Some of these other kids, however, are just plain grotesque.

I could be wrong, but I'm pretty sure it has something to do with beer. I'm not a health guru by any means, but I have noticed that all of the fat kids are holding cans and/or bottles of beer in the majority of their Facebook pictures. The only reason I say this is because I don't drink a lot, yet I have definitely let myself go since high school graduation and I'm still just as skinny as ever. My diet is horrible to say the least, but I have managed to keep the beer to a minimum and I look fantastic compared to some of these cats.

To be honest, I don't know what it is. All I do know, is that I'm absolutely shocked to see the state of these people. I doubt that I will go to my ten-year reunion, but even if I were to go, I wouldn't be shocked at all because of Facebook. Kids that could once run a mile faster than me now look like they could roll a mile faster. Tether Ball contest winners would now dominate in pie eating contests. If I'm this critical about the way they turned out, I wonder what they think about how I've aged.