The Beautiful South, "Valentine's Day Wank" (2001)

Although my high school reunion a few weeks ago was surprisingly non-traumatic, it did make me wonder about the fine line between reminiscences and odd, unhealthy fixations. Befitting the event, many of us sat around at dinner playing the "hey, remember the time...?" game. It was fun and much of it hilarious, even if some of these memories were beginning to have a stale air about them, having been drudged up on such previous, but smaller-scale, occasions. (The time, in the middle of history class, when D. shrieked her conviction that a bug flew into her ear, and a certain class smart-ass remarked that she only needed to wait for it to crawl out the other side; a complicated running joke about M.'s supposed ping-pong prowess; the class production of Hamlet featuring the most deadpan reaction to Ophelia's death ever...)

But when L.Y. started going on and on about the nickname she gave me in those days, I found myself a little bit impatient. Part of it is that the name seemed, even then, so unimaginative: "cynical." (Hell, can an adjective really be a nickname anyway?) A lot of it was that I never recognized myself in that term; even if "cynical" is taken to mean, as it now clichédly does, "deeply emotional underneath that brittle exterior," it still was a woefully inadequately label then. And, if possible, even less applicable now, ___ years later. But I guess in it L.Y. held a particular memory of the person she thought I was -- but I never thought, or never wanted to be, true -- and, on occasions like these, the former always wins out.

And then sometimes I think she may have a point.