Napoleon Dynamite Nagasawa

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Wednesday - June 14, 2006

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I can’t believe that 2006 makes 30 years since I graduated from Leilehua High School. That’s if I did the math right, which of course was my worst subject. Back in 1976, I could-n’t even imagine this far into the future, probably because I was too busy being a nerd.

It’s not even a stretch to know that back in high school I wasn’t one of those popular students like the jocks or the clubbers or even the smart kids. No, I hung out in Mr. Hirai’s science class storage room, playing trumps with my buds, none of whom were female.

I was the overweight average kid who basically hovered just below the popularity radar until I graduated in the country’s bicentennial year. It wasn’t a bad thing, just kind of insignificant at the time. Of course, today and for the last nine years, my name and picture have been sent to everyone’s home on Oahu every week inside of MidWeek.

Because of that, I was contacted by the class reunion group and recruited as one of the chairpersons for the publicity committee. The other week, I was going to attend my first class reunion meeting and saw an e-mail roster of who would be attending.

It was all the popular kids from my class, namely the cheerleaders and athletes. Now I had to get myself in shape just to attend the darned reunion committee meeting. It was worse than preparing to attend the actual reunion. That’s because I needed a crash make-over.

Liposuction, Lasix, hair transplant, teeth whitening and plastic surgery were out of the question. I guess I just had to face my classmates and just be myself, the science-class-storage-room-Joe-average nerd. When I walked into the meeting, the beautiful people were still beautiful.

But you know what? Everyone genuinely acted like we were all old friends, including me. I think it doesn’t matter who you were back in high school, the important thing was that we all shared that same experience.

I’m looking forward to seeing everyone ... well, except for maybe the moke who after third period always used to ask me, “Can borrow quarta?”