I was excited tonight to watch one of the greatest high school reunion flicks of all time: Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion.

OK. I admit it. I love this movie. Strange, because it came out when I was in seventh grade. It’s about two best friends who, ashamed to go to their 10-year high school reunion without a success story, concoct one to go with a flashy car, elaborate up-dos and business suits.

The story? They invented Post-its.

Facing my own 5-year high school reunion around Christmas was … surreal. Thankfully, I didn’t have one of those high school experiences where I placed myself in a certain category: popular, jock, cheerleader, nerd. Unlike Romy and Michele, I didn’t have a chip on my shoulder from being bullied in high school, I didn’t go to woo an old crush or confront an enemy. I was actually looking forward to seeing old friends.

But getting ready for the event, I felt a pang of nervousness in my stomach.

At this point in my life, I have not yet figured out how to define “success.” At a high school reunion, where everyone is trying to be their best, it’s easy to spot how some of my classmates have come to see that term. For some, it’s having a rock on your finger and a handsome stud by your side. For others, it’s wearing the latest fashions, having an expensive bag or designer shoes. For some others, it’s having a gaggle of outgoing friends, or a family, even a baby.

In the absence of most of these things in my own life, I’ve come to define success — and in turn, my own self-worth — by my education and my career. And I’m not always 100 percent sure that that’s the right way to go.

Whether high school was a nightmare you’d rather erase from memory or the best years of your life, there is a painful transformation that takes place during that time that I think everyone goes through. Those years are when we lose something, we cease being uninhibited and unashamed, we forget the ease of childhood. Maybe it’s the first time we start truly caring about what others think. For the first time, real or imagined, we have something to prove about ourselves.

My reunion hit me with a rush of those feelings because, suddenly, I stepped into a room full of the first people to whom I felt like I had to prove something about myself. And I forget exactly what that was in high school — probably that I was “cool,” or different, or smart, or good at sports. It triggered something in my head that put me on “Meet-and-Impress” Mode. Suddenly, I felt like I had to put my successes out there for everyone to see.

When Romy and Michele’s Post-it story backfires and they are laughed out of the room, they return a few minutes later sans business suits, wearing their normal flashy attire and being, well, just themselves. The moral of the story is: there will always be nerds and jocks and popular kids, there will always be bullies and people who take pleasure in putting you down. Just be yourself.

Once you start working, you find that life is — in many ways — just like high school. But if you can shed the attitude that you are only as good as others think you are, then you’ll go a long way. In the end, I guess that’s more and more becoming my definition of “success.”

We’ll see how I fare at the 10-year mark.

photo: tvnz.co.nz

In “Juno,” 16-year-old Juno McGuff, played by Nova Scotia-born actress Ellen Page, gets pregnant and decides to have the baby, put it up for adoption and get on with her life.

I loved it, mainly because of the dialogue and the characters, especially Page’s character.

My mom, however, came away with a different impression.

She thought the movie portrayed a very serious subject much too lightly, and didn’t fully show the repurcussions of becoming an unwed teenage mother at 16.

To her, the message seemed to be: “Hey, teen pregnancy is no big deal.”

I could understand where she was coming from. I noticed that several reviewers gave the movie cautious reviews because of its subject matter.

Juno does experience the physical pains of pregnancy. Added to that, she must endure the reaction from her high school classmates.

But, her parents are surprisingly understanding. And in the end (spoiler alert?), the film seems to be more about her search for love and –basically — happiness, which she finds in things any normal 16-year-old would: playing the guitar and spending time with the sweet, soft-spoken, sweat-band-wearing father of her child (Michael Cera, “Superbad”), who seems no more prepared or concerned than she is regarding the pregnancy.

In essence, it’s a teenage love story … with a baby bump.

Teen pregnancy has been brought to the forefront of pop culture discussion recently starting when 16-year-old Jamie Lynn Spears’ announced in December that she was 12 weeks pregnant. The controversy appeared to boost viewship of Spears’ Nickelodeon show “Zoey 101″– the hour-long season finale was the most-watched episode ever with 7.3 million viewers, according to Nielsen Media Research statistics.

People are worried that giving teen pregnancy too much exposure will give teen girls the impression that it’s OK, maybe even cool to get pregnant.

Part of me feels like we should give girls more credit. I would hope that by the age of 16 most of us would be perfectly capable of separating movies from reality.

On the other hand, I can understand the concern.

According to a Sept. 2006 report by the Guttmacher Institute that compiled teenage pregnancy statistics by state in 2000, Hawaii ranks 12th in the nation in rate of pregnancies among women age 15 to 19, with 93 pregnancies per thousand women. The state with the highest pregnancy rate among women in that age group was Nevada with 113 pregnancies per thousand women.

The Jamie Lynn Spears controversy has shown us that society still looks with quite a bit of horror upon teen pregnancy. Does that mean we should avoid movies that depict teen pregnancy as anything but unsavory?

“Juno” is a surprisingly merciful story about being pregnant at 16. But whether it goes as far as to glamourize teen pregnancy … that’s another question.

What do you think?

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More commentary on “Juno”:

Caitlin Flanagan in the New York Times, “Sex and the Teenage Girl.”

Meredith O’Brien at The Huffington Post, “Life Imitates Art: Juno & Jamie Lynn Spears.”

Wallace Baine in the Santa Cruz Sentinel, “Juno addresses the dicey subject of teen pregnancy with humor and authenticity.”

Ellen Goodman in The Boston Globe, “Changing the script on teen pregnancy.” (My mom says she agrees most with this viewpoint.)