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In high school, people would pick fights with me, solely for the grand and dramatic reason that I had changed. "You’ve changed!" they would huff at me, like I was a bigger bigot than Mel Gibson. What’s so wrong with changing? Do I really want to be the naïve albeit nice pansy that I was 10 years ago? I mean, I’ve been changing since I was changing diapers! I’ve switched teams (from hating boys to loving them a bit too much) lowered my IQ throughout the years, compromised my morals more and more each year and become a bit more of an angry irrational person as each birthday comes along. (Senility is just around the corner.) Kidding, I’d like to think that I have a more esoteric personality. Sure, I’m now much more discriminating with my circle of friends, but that’s the reason that I avoid the very thing "changing" seems to mean to these people —i.e. being plastic.

Some people also can’t get that just because you can’t be chums like you used to be, you’re now evil. A monster with a heart of chrome. I mean, people offer their shoulders for you to cry on when you break up with your boyfriend, but if you break up with a friend, it gets very tricky. You become the kind of person who can’t keep friends, because you’re too good for friends. People grow out of each other all the time; it’s an ugly and unsentimental fact of life. Although, like with any breakup, always make sure you’re not the jerk. Like, if you drop people because you think you’re too cool for them. Or maybe you think that they just have no place in your sleek new life.

It’s time to go back to the sandbox, because that’s probably where we belong. But in many cases, well-meaning people just lose touch and grow apart. It’s better than trying to force a friendship that is held together by the very thin twine of the past. It’s like a bad marriage.(opinion of a 20 year old angel)lol

Sometimes I bump into old classmates who say, in mid-sneer, "you’ve changed" the less cavalier ones resort to good old-fashioned backstabbing. "Oh, she’s changed…" they confide with one another, like I’ve invented a new torture chamber that kills kittens.

A friend once told me that some of our high school cohorts were discussing who had changed among our batch and who had not. You would have thought that the winners in this inferno version of the view would be the ones who had moved on and got themselves questionable lovers and unexpected pregnancies. But the shape shifters of our batch were branded one by one as bitches (me included… sniff) by the panel, for the very specific and damning reason that we "had changed." My spy told me that all these girls have still been dating the same guys, have remained at the same "jobs" since we graduated(high school) and still wear baggy clothes(not as in volume, I mean Dawson’s Creek baggy).

So, if only to avoid being damned to wear gross ’90s slacks, I’d rather be the bitch in hungkera(how do you spell that again?). lol. I mean I’m really a completely different person now. For example the old me never cared about clothes — fast forward to now. I literally would starve myself to buy the newest Fendi bag. Yeah, so I’m not better now than I was before, just different. But at least I don’t give in to peer pressure anymore like I used to (I was the doormat-next-door in my academic years. I mean high school!) And cave in to eating lasagna in the afternoon or drinking regular soda instead of diet, just because everybody was doing it.

No, but really. I’m proud of every change that I have made in my life. I’m not going to apologize for who I am. I’ll be lost in retro land anyway with the bad boyfriends in noisy cars and catty women who don’t wear nail polish. I mean, why be a Japanese spitz (a dying and endangered breed form the ’80s) when you can be au courant mixed breed like a poogle (poodle and beagle)? Change is good and don’t ever let anyone in ugly baggy slacks tell you otherwise.

-maeryl d.