I have been flooded by emails from class mates in the last few weeks appreciating my recent blog postings on this alumni website and encouraging me to continue the writing. Well when I say ‘flooded’ it was actually just three. But this series of emails has had an interesting effect on me. I was struggling to put my finger on what it was evoking and then realised it was something called self worth and confidence. This feeling was somewhat unusual until I realised that these emails probably amount to the greatest appreciation I have ever received by a group (except for that one time in tenth or eleventh grade when I was one of the first to get chicken pox and went around spreading it among many of my fellow students who all thought that two weeks in the dispensary would be any day better than going to class). This does off course tell you a lot about my sad state of affairs, but enough of the self-pity.
The fallout of this sense of confidence was to start me thinking about how to continue the blogging and perhaps get more people to participate and re-connect. The more I thought about it the more I kept hearing this line in my head - “the road the hell is paved with good intentions”.
My initial thoughts were to start a series of questions that would lead to a series of what I call “historical confessions”. Like most secrecy acts that keep secrets locked away for a limited period, I thought it’s now more than 20 years since people have left school and have entered a completely new stage of life. Surely we could get people to start opening up about some of the things they were not comfortable talking about at, or right after school.
Questions included:
- Whatever ever happened to that girlfriend/boyfriend who you thought you would spend the rest of your life with and how would you introduce them to your current spouse/partner?
- If you left school before graduation can you please tell the rest of us the real reason for this?- What really was the worst school regulation that you broke and if you have children how would you react to them doing the same?
- Did we have, or can we make up a retrospective class list of “person most likely to succeed/become a leader/fail/be famous/be infamous/become an ascetic/be a millionaire etc." and then actually see what those people are up to now?
- Any other secrets or confessions that someone wants to make after 20 years and their perspective on it now that we are a different generation.
Of course I realised it looked a bit like an Oprah Winfrey script, but also that at best there would be that awkward pin-drop silence on the website while people wondered who is going to go first, or at worst I could be excommunicated from the alumni list by “she who must be obeyed” (the name that Merryn has appropriately given to our beloved class shepherd - Lorrie).
So to keep good intentions in control, how about this why not also post a short blog on the latest person you met from our class and on how you think they have really changed since leaving Woodstock.
Also let me clarify that anyone who wants to respond to the other topics I suggested above is free to do so, but completely at their own risk (if that’s OK with you Lorrie?). And lastly I promise not to consider any posting in response to this as fan mail, and if you hear a loud “pop”, it’s probably just a self-confident bubble.
