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From NY Magazine: Throughout high school, my friend Kenji
had never once spoken to the Glassmans. They were a popular, football-playing,
preposterously handsome set of identical twins (every high school must have its
Winklevii). Kenji was a closeted, half-Japanese orchestra nerd who kept mainly
to himself and graduated first in our class. Yet last fall, as our 25th
high-school reunion was winding down, Kenji grabbed Josh Glassman by his
triceps—still Popeye spinach cans, and the subject of much Facebook discussion
afterward—and asked where the after-party was. He was only half-joking.
Psychologically speaking, Kenji carries a passport to pretty
much anywhere now. He’s handsome, charming, a software engineer at an Amazon
subsidiary; he radiates the kind of self-possession that earns instant respect.
Josh seemed to intuit this. He said there was an after-party a few blocks away,
at the home of another former football player. And when Kenji wavered, Josh
wouldn’t take no for an answer. “I could see there was no going back,” Kenji
explained the next morning, over brunch. “It was sort of like the dog who
catches the car and doesn’t know what to do with it.”
….Not everyone feels the sustained, melancholic presence of
a high-school shadow self. There are some people who simply put in their four
years, graduate, and that’s that. But for most of us adults, the adolescent
years occupy a privileged place in our memories, which to some degree is even
quantifiable: This phenomenon even has a name—the “reminiscence bump”—and it’s
been found over and over in large population samples.....
Don’t stop now. Read
all about it at http://nymag.com/news/features/high-school-2013-1/
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