Confession: I don't like people.

I’m ditching my 15-year high school reunion.


That same weekend, I’m also ditching my family’s annual family reunion/camping trip, my husband’s annual cop-get-together and my mother-in-law’s annual visit. I don’t know what I AM going to do--or where I’m going to go--but it’s NOT going to be any sort of annual reunion what-have-you-been-up-to Suck Fest.

It’s not like I’m embarrassed of myself or my accomplishments. Frankly, modesty aside, I’m a reunion’s wet dream: I have a satisfying career, hot husband, cute kids, nice house with a white picket fence, and I still fit into the jeans I wore in 10th grade (with the fabulous addition of big boobs…hey, look at me, I’ve IMPROVED since high school!). In addition, none of my immediate family is addicted to anything (although I worry about Kathleen’s obsession with gum), my credit card debt is lower than the national average (and the national debt) and no one I know is in jail (Stu WORKS in the jail…but he’s on the right side of the bars and gets to wear a gun belt, so it’s cool).

See, I win at the Suck Fest “watcha-been-up-to” game.

Which is why I don’t want to go. I’m shy, I don’t like small talk and I generally hate people. Seriously. I like the people I like (think about it, that statement actually does make sense) and I enjoy people-watching (people are FUCKED UP and I just love to watch them in all of their lame-ass glory…makes me feel better about myself and amuses me greatly), but I just don’t really want to interact with the majority of human kind. To those who know me, this is old news. In fact, to any who’ve ever SEEN me, this is old news.

I’ve never been picked up in a bar. For a while, I worried that this was a reflection of my lack of hotness. I actually obsessed over it. I know lots of girls who get picked up all the time…women who get hit on at the local bar, at the gym, in the frozen-foods aisle of Wal-Mart (I actually don’t envy them for this: have you SEEN most of them men who shop at Wal-Mart? Yikes!). In fact, I spent a good six months laying awake at night, concerned that I have some weird pheromone disease that makes me repel men or something.

It got the point where I decided I actually have a problem. So, being me, I researched it: Googled "I repel men”. Surprisingly, this resulted in 2,000 hits…we women are a worried breed! It took only one Self Help article to reveal my problem: I don’t smile.

Don’t go thinking I’m some Eeyore-Grumpy-Dwarf depressed Emo-type person…that’s my mother-in-law. I actually smile all the time. I laugh. I giggle. I chortle, grin, smirk, beam. I even have a polite courtesy smile if I grind my back teeth together tightly enough.

I just don’t feel the need to smile at people I don’t know. Why would I? If I smile at them, they think they can talk to me. And I don’t particularly like talking to people.

And therein lies my problem. I don’t have man-repulsing pheromones…I have people-repulsing bitchiness.
I’m ok with this. Probably because I don’t find many men attractive. I know, I know, I’m the woman who just told you that I fantasize about half of the town. This is true. But think about it….if I fantasize about HALF of the town, that means I only find HALF of the town attractive. And I’m only counting in that half the men who are approximately my age and acceptability bracket (if you think mullets, shants and the ability to burb the alphabet after a 6 pack of Keystone Light are hot, you are NOT in the acceptability bracket).

When I DO find men attractive, I smile at them. This dispels the man-repulsing bitchiness and they usually smile back and come over to talk to me.

So, I can scratch that concern off my list, but it still doesn’t solve my plural reunion Suck Fests problem.
Here’s why I don’t want to go: what the hell am I going to talk about with people whom I rarely see and therefore don’t actually like enough to talk to on a regular basis? I mean, if we don’t at least read each other’s updates on Facebook, we don’t know each other and there’s probably a good reason for that. Like we never liked each other or found each other even remotely attractive, interesting or worthy in the first place.

Therefore, I don’t really want to hear about their kid’s kindergarten graduation (Kathleen’s was fabulous, but that’s because she’s MY kid!), their husband’s job or their most recent root canal. It’s boring. My courtesy smile will make my cheeks ache and I’ll turn into a Bitch.

As a Bitch, I will stop pretending to care about some person’s trip to Disneyland and will instead start acting like a jackass. I may decide to share things like the fact that I just decided to ignore the fact that the girls plugged up the guest bathroom toilet with too much TP and shit again and am going to leave it until Stu wakes up. Or I could describe the time I drank too many frozen margaritas on an empty stomach and puked right outside the Tijuana border. Or perhaps I’ll share my favorite anecdote: the fact that the local daycare recently had an outbreak of butt-worms: oh yeah, they exist…the nasty maggot-like-things crawl out of the baby’s butt at nighttime and back in during the day, making the kid have itchy-ass. Nasty, huh? My kids managed not to catch it, but I found the existence of butt-worms in humans a throw-up-in-my-mouth fascinating little conversational tidbit.

It’s not like I don’t have appropriately amusing small-talk anecdotes to share. Of course I do. And if they weren’t amusing in real life, they’re pretty fucking funny by the time I’m done ‘enhancing’ them. I can hyperbole the hell out of any small incident. Remember Seinfeld, the hilarious show about nothing? Well, you read my blog, so you know that my life about nothing is pretty fucking hilarious.

For example, I could impress them with Jennifer’s dancing abilities by talking about her first dance recital. For her tap number, she and the other 3-year-olds were dressed as cowgirls (complete with little white boots and hat) and danced to Boot-scootin’-boogie. At the end of the number, she lifted her red-and-whited checked skirt, stood in the spotlight, and waved and blew kisses. For five minutes. Finally her teacher dashed out, picked up the little star and carried her off to thundering applause.

And, of course, I could tell some of the hilarious cop stories Stu brings home. Cops have all the best stories because they deal with the worst of humanity. I LOVE being married to a cop! Dinner-time conversation is always enlightening.

Or I could brag about my 6-year-old-going-on-20 who pointed out, very vociferously, that grown men shouldn’t wear ‘girl panties’ at the pool.

Last Spring Break, I drove my babies 200 miles through the Nevada and California desert to Palm Springs. The drive itself was fairly uneventful, interrupted only by frantic how-are-you?!? text-messages from every male cop I know (they were worried about me driving by myself with the kids through the desert. I don’t know if this is because of the super-crazies who live along 395 in half-rotted single-wides or my less-than-stellar driving skills), DVD movie changes (I had to switch movies while driving 90 MPH and swerving around semi trucks) and desperate searches for semi-clean bathrooms (at one gas station, the only option was a porta-potty that perched precariously on the side of a dirt hill…Kathleen announced she didn’t have to potty all that badly after all. That’s my girl!). Anyway, after 11 hours—we somehow ended up at the Tijuana border (look, girls, that’s where Mommy puked once!) and had to backtrack a bit—we arrived in lovely Palm Springs. Within 10 minutes of our arrival, we hit the pool where we discovered an unfortunate Spring Break 2010 fashion: men in speedos.

Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate a well-formed man in speedos. I smile engagingly at men who play water polo or grace the cologne ads in Cosmo. However, the average Spring Breaker male college boy ought not to wear ballkinis. Worse, they ought not to wear PINK ballkinis in cold pools with their too-much-beer mushy tummies pushed up in muffin-top over the band of their skin-tight pastel panties. Not hot. So not hot Kathleen knew, at the tender age of 6, that something was very rotten in the State of California. Being my daughter, she gleefully invented the game of ‘which girl-panty-wearing-boy is most gross’. FUN! See, when you have kids, you’re allowed to be loudly rude in the guise of shushing your doesn’t-know-any-better child:

Kathleen (in a very loud, high-pitched voice): ‘Mommy, WHY is that boy wearing girl panties with a flower on his butt?”

Mommy (in a pretending-to-be-embrarrased loud voice): “Honey, shh….I don’t know why he would do that…and it’s not nice to point at unfortunate people.”

Good times.

See, I’m funny. I can small-talk with the best of them. In fact, I can steal center stage and be the life of the party.

But I don’t want to. I don’t want to go hang out with old high school people and pretend like I’m having fun. I don’t want to go camping with my family and pretend I enjoy being dirty, tired, sore and covered in mosquito bites. I don’t want to sit and stare at my mother-in-law and pretend like we can stand each other.

I’d rather wash my hair. I’d rather clean out the minivan. I’d rather run naked down main street during the Carson Valley Days parade, waving an American Flag and telling everyone I’m the Terminator…ok, that’s one of the funny cop-stories I could tell if I actually wanted to engage in small talk. Except the Terminator was a naked man who got tased in the casino arcade for his trouble. After the cop who was chasing him stopped laughing.

So, on the weekend of the multiple Suck Fests, I believe I'll load up the minivan with the kids, DVDs and snacks and strike out for parts unknown. Maybe we’ll go back to Palm Springs and see if ballkinis are still all the rage.

If you see me there, unless I’m smiling, don’t talk to me. Chances are, I don’t like you.