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My twenty-year high school reunion is this year (I know, surprise surprise, you thought I looked 26). I’m not looking forward to it as much as I thought I would, but not for the reasons you’re thinking. I’m not running from an awkward encounter with my Homecoming date. I haven’t assembled a crime record and most, if not all, my acne is gone (depending on the day). No, I’m just not as excited because the element of surprise is gone. The culprit? Facebook. Facebook has ruined my high-school reunion.

Think about what reunions used to be: meeting up with someone you’ve completely lost touch with, catching up on people’s lives, reuniting with the old flame, and, most importantly, seeing who looks amazingly good and who has totally let themselves go (by rule, it’s always a cheerleader). It’s this moment of somewhat shocking perspective, causing you to reflect on where you are in life and how much you have or haven’t changed since those formative pre-college years.

Now? I already know what people are doing. In fact, I know what they are doing every single damn day. When their kids are sick, what they had for dinner, how they felt after Obama’s inauguration. I know where they live and where they went on vacation. I’ve seen photos of all of them. The only surprise left is trying to figure out who has let themselves go but sneakily posted the sort of Facebook photos that are angled in a way where you can’t quite tell.

This really started happening about a year ago. Until then, my only high school “friends” were the Friends I’d truly stayed in touch with. Then, one day, the dam broke and the social graph that is UCHS Class of ’89 (Go Centurions) came spilling into my inbox. It happened in one giant wave and it was disorienting. Within days, Mr. Popular was friends with the guy that got trashcanned in the quad. Ms. Quiet was gifting everyone with cartoon flowers. People that scarcely nodded at each other in the halls were now writing on eachother’s walls. It felt like some natural order had been disrupted.

But I’ve thought about it a lot since then and realized that maybe a reunion without surprises could actually make it even better. I want to see how a year gathered around the virtual keg changes things in real life. After all, a party is way more fun the better you know the partiers. Maybe we’ll all feel some bond even after so much time has passed. Perhaps the first three small talk questions are out of the way and the conversation will be more substantial. And maybe some of those cliques will have disappeared a bit more than usual because a social network connection actually teaches you more about a person than five minutes of trying to speak over the house band. Just possibly the most powerful step to gaining perspective on your own life twenty years out is by joining the Facebook group “University City High School Class of 89 Reunion”.

There’s only one way to find out for sure. Fire up the Depeche and prepare the cash bar. Let’s do this.