Spring Breaking and Nostalgia

It is now 1:30 on a Monday afternoon. I'm still in my pjs. Here's a list of the day's activities so far:

Ate breakfast: leftover rolls with jam. Mmmm, nutritious
Worked on my iTunes library...for quite awhile (thanks for the music, Sarah)
Facebooked
Removed my chipped nail polish

Now I'm thinking it's about time for lunch. I did manage, in the course of my iTunes/Facebook activities, to reconnect with a friend I haven't seen since I was 11--when I moved from a tiny town in Southern Utah back to the paradise of Southern California. Now, living in New York City (somewhat less temperate, and far more inhabited than either of the above locales), I don't even know how to approach talking to people I knew in the 5th grade. I have little recollection of what I was like then, but I seem to remember that being my rebellious stage. I don't know that I can really back that up except to say that I swore more at that age than I would like to admit to now, and I routinely rode my bike out past the city limits with a couple of other girls to visit a farm we had no business visiting. I read Stephen King, watched as many R-rated horror movies as I could get my hands on (though, in retrospect, many of the movies I thought were rated R were actually PG-13), and watched MTV at the house of the aforementioned friend. Yeah...I was a pretty bad kid. Luckily my mom never found out.

At the only elementary school in town, with only two classes for each grade, there was some definite social stratification going on, and not finding myself quite at the top, I rooted myself safely in the middle. I can only assume that that's where this friend of mine lived and stayed long after I made my departure. She was pretty, but edgy. I loved her white-blonde hair, and the only inside joke of ours that I can remember now was about trading mine for hers. In my nostalgia, I think of her as the pre-teen version of Claire Danes from My So Called Life. Now, even though I can't remember who was above or below us on that social ladder, it still frames my perceptions of myself and my friends at the time. I recognize that I am a different person, but in my mind, she is just a taller version of her 11-year-old self. Facebook stepped in this morning to tell me that she also has a four-year-old son, but other than that, she must be exactly the same.