High School Confidential

The PopCulteer
July 17, 2015

After a week of chaotic computer craziness, all is back to normal at sprawling PopCult Manor. This week, we have a little essay and some items for you along with highlights of Stuff To Do this weekend and some news on upcoming Radio Free Charleston stuff. But first, we’ll kick it off with some wordiness.

Reunion Time Blues

We are smack dab in the middle of summer and it’s high school reunion season. This year, for the first time in a long time, I enjoyed a pleasant, blissful ignorance of my own high school reunion, which apparently took place a week or two ago. I am one of those people who will never attend a high school reunion.

People ask me why. Was high school such a horrible time for me that I never want to revisit those years?

My answer is an emphatic yes. High school was the worst time of my life. Worse than the cancellation of the Radio Free Charleston radio show, worse than the breakup of my first marriage, worse than the years spent as an end-of-life caregiver for my parents and uncle…high school was worse for me than that, and it lasted three years…but it felt like thirty.

I have some good friends from high school and to be honest, thanks to Facebook I’m probably more social with people with whom I attended high school now than I was when I was actually attending high school. But the point is, high school was a hellish time for me and the thought of revisiting it is a nightmare scenario to me.

In previous years, I have been hassled, some might even say harassed, by people who “really wanted to see me” for some unfathomable reason. My take is, if you really want to see me, see me. Don’t do it in the construct of some asinine re-gathering of many, many people that I couldn’t wait to get away from all those years ago.

This year, for whatever reason, nobody asked me to go to my high school reunion. This marks my first truly fond memory related to high school. I want to thank whomever it was who finally got the message that I was not going to go to a high school reunion and decided not to waste their time asking me. Maybe putting this message in my “About Me” section on Facebook finally worked: “Please note that I do not plan to attend any high school reunions…ever. If you ask me, I will block you.”

I hope that other people who are planning other high school reunions follow the example of my former classmates and refrain from pestering people who say they don’t want to go to a high school reunion.

High School daydreams

Many people have perfectly valid and deservedly private reasons for not wanting to attend a high school reunion. Without prying, reunion planners should respect that fact and not press or pry or harangue or harass. If somebody doesn’t want to go to your party that’s their business, not yours. You should realize that not everybody had the same happy experience as you.

For some people, high school is the best time of their lives. They long to recapture that brief period. I feel really bad for these people because if you’re lucky, life is a long, long journey, and it must really suck to peak that early.

Anyone who’s read this blog for any length of time knows that I am heavily afflicted with nostalgia. I love the idea of recapturing the fun moments of my life. I enjoy the toys of my youth; the classic TV shows, comic books, and movies that gave me so much pleasure through the years. I would go to a Charleston Playhouse Reunion in a heartbeat. I just had a blast digging into my tape archives from a quarter century ago for the Radio Free Charleston streaming audio show.

Next month, I’m probably going to wallow in even more nostalgia a little bit as we mark the tenth anniversary of this very blog. But high school? I’ll pass on that one. Some memories are best left forgotten.

Finding Our Voice

You may have noticed that New Appalachian Radio at Voices of Appalachia has been silent for nearly two weeks. With any luck, the streaming internet radio station will be back up and running in time for next Tuesday’s episode of Radio Free Charleston.

What has happened has been a case of bad timing. Some technical issues crept up, largely due to the station’s rapid growth, and that necessitated a switch to new servers. Unfortunately this happened right in the middle of an extremely busy period for folks at the station mixed with vacation time for others. With all this going on, the important repairs to VOA had to be back-burnered, but with any luck we will be up and running again soon. I hope we can do this next week because we’ve got a lot of announcements to make about expanding Radio Free Charleston and adding two and possibly three new programs which will be produced under the auspices of General Substances.

So keep your fingers crossed and in the meantime, catch up with the Radio Free Charleston archives so that you don’t miss any cool stuff. Of special note are our recent shows that featured the music of Hasil Adkins and The Amazing Delores.

About Radio Free Charleston

Remember our video program? We took the week off from producing it this week because we had major computer issues of our own. Those are now resolved. The plan is to give you a new RFC MINI SHOW Monday morning and then bring you another full episode a week after that. Now that our computer issues are ironed out, we think we can get back on schedule and hopefully alternate between full episodes and episodes of the MINI SHOW for the foreseeable future.