Confessions of a Former Class Officer

Below is my friend Susan's response to yesterday's post.

Clarifications and Confessions of a Former Class Officer
By Susan aka Tori

Dear Bill,
I obviously feel compelled to respond at length to your blog entry about the reunion, having been called out in such fashion.

Clarification 1. How can you say you weren’t popular? If you went to our high school with the last name M****m, you were automatically popular, even if you were secretly a big dork with an enormous comic book collection.

Clarification 2. I was not popular. Viola-playing, theater-loving, academic decathletes by definition are not popular. Now, according to Clarification 1, if my last name had been M****m like yours, it wouldn’t matter if I picked my nose and ate it every day, I still would have been popular.

I wish I could tell you that I ran for class officer because I was super passionate about who won the Hallway Decorating Competition (we lost our senior year and Steve G yelled at me) or because I wholeheartedly looked forward to the day when I would be privileged enough to plan the reunion. But really, I just wanted two things.

First, I wanted that bright yellow hall pass that enabled me to do whatever the hell I wanted at any point in the school day, that golden ticket that said, “Class Council Business.” As a class officer senior year, you were just given this blank hall pass with unlimited use. Flash that golden slip at any hall monitor or teacher, saying something like, oh I don’t know, “I need to go buy more posters for the Pep Rally,” and you were out of class. Sadly, or not, depending on your perspective, I used most of this time to go get Slurpees, which, looking back, was this weird status symbol in our school. If you showed up in school with a Slurpee, it meant a) you had a car and b) you somehow got out of school. None of this iPod, iPhone status-y crap. A Slurpee meant something in our town.

And now the second reason I ran for class officer. I am sorry to confess that I ran for class officer because…I really just needed something good for my college applications. Bill, I might not have needed to partake in this sham if I had not spent all of 9th grade Social Studies competing with you for who could get the most zeros. (Although it is worth noting that for as many of the zeros I accumulated for not doing a shred of homework and talking to you through entire classes, many of my zeros were also accumulated by eating in class. You may remember that the marching band was selling candy to go to Florida and I single-handedly bought and consumed enough candy to fund the entire trip.)

From the bitter, bitter tone in your blog entry, I now understand that there were many people, such as you, who held pure, practically holy motives in running for Class Council, and to all of those individuals, I apologize for snagging the job in the interest of Slurpees and entrance into an excellent liberal arts college. And so, realizing the errors of my past, I hereby in the presence of the entire blogosphere, renounce my claim to the position of Secretary of the Class of 1988 and appoint Bill as my worthy successor.

To Cyndi, Kim, Tiffany, Tara, and anyone else who planned and executed our 5th, 10th and 15th reunions: a belated thank you for doing my former job for me. I had a lot of fun and got really drunk at all three. I would feel really happy if you all did it again, and this time I will be more outwardly thankful. I think you clearly have a very interested person to recruit for the planning committee named Bill, especially since he is now Secretary of the Class of 1988. And it seems that if you’re really lucky, at the end of each planning meeting, he might dry hump you like he did Steve W.