edges

There's this new show called my generation. Don't you feel like doing a show like that? Go back to high school? I suppose that's the allure of 10 year reunions...but I really want to go back further, middle school maybe, the wallflower. In high school I had just enough friends, enough good grades, enough quick quips and enough tenuous connections, to be lost in the shuffle, to be exceedingly ordinary. The one most extraordinary moment was the last week of high school, when my psych class taped blank sheets on our backs and wrote on anonymous nice things about each other. Then we chose one to read out loud and whoever wrote it could own up to it. One person wrote: I love your personality, seriously, I don't know what it is but I am attracted to it.

Of course I read that one out loud.

It was one of the more popular kids, kind of rebellious and never took classes too seriously. (Or as far as his asian parents would allow him to, I guess). It's incredibly shallow how much I secretly treasure that incident. Not because he was in the circle, but simply because I was in another one. Isn't it weird how extraneous players barely skimming the limits of your radius can be affected by you--and more powerfully, in turn, you by them? To be honest my effect on him has probably already washed out along with the last carefree summer before college, but the echo back to me resounds still. Not because of us or because of high school but because of something bigger, because it's a reminder that someone out there with no liability to you as a parent or friend, might presently be vaguely charmed by you. And isn't that a pleasant thought? So going back to the beginning of the post...

In our generation, where we pour our thoughts into condensed texts and behind computer screens (note the irony), where indifference rules with the iron-clad hand, where not even the most intimate act will merit anything except an awkward hello in the halls, will those moments only become more and more spare? Will we cease realize the quaint powers of charm and attraction? Will those who linger on our peripheral outlines spill over to the other side of the horizon?

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