What were you like, way back when?

This is a story of reverting to type.

I started a new job six months ago and change, and my company wanted to do some PR about my joining. We have talking points for me to use with reporters (this isn’t a business newsletter and the majority of you don’t really understand or care what I do for a living, and if anything, I’ve probably said something like: “You know how when you hear about a company having a $100 million dollar ad budget? My job is to determine how that $100 million is spent,” so I won’t go into what those talking points are).

Anyway, I was SO READY for those talking points for my interviews, prepared on a Google doc from our PR person. I was dressed up in an expensive silk blouse, hair as put together as it can be, looking like the senior corporate professional I have become.

I’m a shy ENFP and a Leo, which is a paradoxical combination of a shy extrovert who still likes to be at the center of attention. Surprise party? For me? PERFECT. But interviews, not really my favorite thing in the world. The fact that I don’t fit into a neat box is why I also don’t get too excited about MECE personality allocations of people either.

So get this, after about 7 minutes of a really lovely conversation with a kind reporter, she asked me what I was like in high school.

I am 30 years out of high school.

“Sorry, what, I don’t think I got that?”

But I heard correctly. WHAT WAS I LIKE IN HIGH SCHOOL.

I should say I didn’t hate the question, I just was woefully unprepared.

Well, surely it’s the Hollywood influence, but I think of high school as a series of crushes. Starting with the chaste one I slow danced with at a Halloween party where I went as myself but said I was Donna from Twin Peaks. Ending with the one I henna-ed my hair with.

Technically that represents the bounds of high school, freshman to senior year, but there is the estuary from graduation to the years you come home from college and hang out with your high school friends on break, so there are more memories after that, and it gets kind of blurry.

None of these things were appropriate to mention.

So I settled on music as through-line. Yes, another crush, the one with whom I went to clove-infused concerts at the Pine Street Theatre in Portland, when E Burnside was still grit and not at all gentrified. In my era, there is something about Early ‘90s Pacific Northwest that is as poignant as the Summer of ‘68 to the generation before me.

Maybe you know that Everclear song, where the lyrics go “I will buy that big house, way up in the West Hills?” Half of my friends came from a big house way up in the West Hills. That was my home.

The past couple of years have been tough in a way that I’m not [yet? ever?] able to talk about, although if you know me, you may know half of the broad brushstrokes. And so, when my friend from high school, A, texted me that she had tickets to go see my favorite band, the Pixies, in Seattle, I read it as there not really being a choice in the matter.

The concert was this past week. It was after a particularly busy time at work, involving late nights and non-weekends and skipping PTO days and Juneteenth. Every day I woke up, and said, today is mile 20 of a marathon; it’s the hardest day but it will get easier. And the next day, no THAT was mile 20, and so on.

But I had to go to this concert. I had to go because I had made a commitment and paid for my flights. And also because I knew it would be good for my soul.

I was still thinking about work when I was with A, and rehearsing in my head a presentation I was going to need to record the next morning at 9am. I was excited about the concert, but also so incredibly relieved by the local Seattle noise ordinance that decreed it couldn’t go too late.

I even blurted out the beginning of my presentation at one point, as we were walking between concert venue and parking lot, “What I’m so excited about this tool I am about to show you is that…” but she did not care. She has an Important Job for the Alaska fisheries. My job is merely to fuel capitalism.

Before the concert, we talked about important things as well as vague memories, and the omnipresent question, “whatever happened to this person who can’t be found on any social media platform or on a Google search?” And when the lights went down at the concert, I sang along every word to every song, my Oura ring thought I danced, and my heart was so full.

I took a video of “Here Comes Your Man” and posted and deleted it and posted and deleted it because there are few worse things than to see someone else’s concert video on Instagram stories. Because I did it at midnight Seattle time, I hope nobody saw.

I went to bed hours after my typical 8:30pm bedtime, and yet, because I am middle-aged, I still woke up at 5:30am.

As I had done every morning after a concert when I was a teenager, I put on one of the two concert t-shirts I had bought the night before (one difference in that 30+ year gulf? I can now afford two concert t-shirts), just to show off, to ANYONE, that I had been there.

Of the two shirts, one is white, and one black. The white one has the better design, but to my dismay, it did not look good with the only bra I had with me, which as usual, was black.

Of course if I had meetings — even an internal Teams call — I would have dressed professionally in a blouse, but all I had to do was this one recording of my screen, with my camera off, and then a quick rest before my flight home.

When I sat down to record my client presentation, I SWEAR I had my computer camera off. All the client would need to see is my screen. I could be a disembodied voice speaking over a cursor and a mouse arrow, and it would be fine. I still think I had my camera off, but my corporate computer is a PC that runs AI software in the background, and, well, I have my suspicions about whether my camera ever really turns off.

You know where this is headed.

Imagine my horror to see the edited version of my presentation, packaged up for the client, with a full video of myself, band t-shirt and all.

GOOD THING I had changed to the black shirt so they couldn’t at least see my bra.

No, no, it wasn’t a big deal, I was told. It was better that way. It was “more authentic.” I suppose it tracks with that interview where I was a girl in the mosh pit.

Tell me. What would you say now if asked what you were like way back when?

The fit check I sent A the morning after