November 22, 2004

• I've stumbled across an old friend's name on line, found out more and sent the email. We emailed once or twice, but there really wasn't anything there anymore. Ah well, we all change and move on. Didn't turn out badly, just didn't turn out at all.
• I don't relate to human beings in this way.
• I had a friend I'd lost touch with e-mail me via a review at Amazon! It was odd, she knew I had read the book many years before when we were living in the same town, and thought the tone and style of the review sounded like me, so she e-mailed me. Turned out she was right. We have kept in touch since.
• One of the reasons I use my real name for my domain name is so that people can find me. It has worked; several people I'd lost touch with since high school/college have contacted me over the years through my blog. Some of them have stayed in touch, others have disappeared back into the ether, but I figure they know where to look for me if they ever want to talk to me again. That so many of my old friends do not stay in touch given how absolutely trivial it is to do so these days means to me that people let old acquaintances die on purpose. It's just that we used to have easier excuses for doing so.
• I found my study partner from college through the internets, we exchanged e-mail for a few weeks then I never heard from her again. Ah well, so it goes. Also I was contacted by an old BF, we were engaged at one time, back when I was 24. He left me for a 17 year old with big tits, 3 days before the wedding. Such a brave soul, to contact me after our history. He got just what he deserved. No reply, except fuck off.
• It used to be a hobby of mine to see if I could track down long lost friends using the internet. I've had a few successes, only to find out they weren't really interested in reconnecting. I've managed to strike up an ongoing email correspondence with a couple of them, though, including my ex-boyfriend from college.
• i think i've told this one before, but here's for our beloved noobs... 20 years ago back in college i had a boyfriend i adored. we split up for stupid reasons, married others, split from others. back in may 2002 i did this bizarre story on naked teenage slumber parties. it was posted to a journalism blog and my former sweetie read it. he dropped me an email. i responded. we'll be married next year. never been happier. his is the name tattooed on my ass! :-D
• A close friend of mine had an old boyfriend contact her. They had both idolized the memory of each other. They emailed each other across the country for months. Fell in love with each other again after 15 years. But when she flew up to meet him it went horribly wrong. He was a mean inconsiderate host, she ended up leaving almost as soon as she arrived. She was heartbroken and embarrassed. And that perfect memory of their relationship was shattered. Some things may be best left in the past.
• You're getting married next year? Awesome! I must have missed the announcement. I found my best friend from when I was 6 through one of the school-reunion-type sites. We exchanged where-are-you-now emails but that was all I was really interested in. I also did some online geneology work a few years back and found a bunch of relatives in Canada - one branch of my mother's family emigrated from Scotland to Canada, the other to NZ. There's a lake in BC with my maternal family name.
• Yes, I have probably had contact with 10 or 20 people from my past via the Internet, going back as far as the kid next door in Germany nearly 30 years ago. I would best characterize the exchanges as doglike, just sniffing each other's butts to find out how far we've come, then moseying along. Our actual friends are always those people we have kept continuously in touch with. I also agree with briank's sentiments about friendships being incredibly disposable these days. Neither my wife or myself understand what's gotten into people -- we think most individuals are too caught up in their 9-to-5 world.
• Also, cool story, SideDish! But all those porn sites seem to be undoing all of your careful research.
• Use to pal around quite a bit with one of my undergrad professors - We were in many ways total personality oppsites, but for some reason we always got along well, and I ended up helping her with various aspects of her non-professorial work. She up and left one day, no one knew where or why. This was maybe 12 years ago. Was having lunch one day with a different professor (now a friend) and topic of conversation got round to "remember so-and-so?" We talked about how Professor One had departed so abruptly, and I got a curiousity bug up my butt, so when I returned to work I googled her name. Got exactly two hits, both of them at different universities, both several years old - but one was a Yahoo address. So I wrote up a letter and sent it out, just to see what would happen. About a month later, she replied! She had moved to Spain with one of her students from here (hee!) but that didn't work out (20 year age difference) and now she lives in Spain in a farmhouse with a bunch of cats and a sheep, teaching English and Business Commo at Galicia Junior College or some such place, and is apparently as happy as the proverbial clam. We trade emails perhaps a half-dozen times a year. An absolutely glorious woman. She believes in past lives and ghosts, has been a subscriber to Ms. magazine nearly since it's inception, knows everything there could possibly be to know about asian food, is petrified of snakes (I personally killed several for her when her house flooded in '92), smokes a colossal amount of pot, and is one of those people that are just scary-smart, the ones where you and several other smart people are having a discussion about this or that bit of esoterica and she'd come in with these incredible, head turning, chin-rubbing, jealousy inducing comments, I mean just unbelievable. I am very very glad to have made her reacquaintance after so many years.
• What timing! Just last Friday, I heard from a high school friend I had lost track of. Turns out she has a PhD in bioinformatics - which is what I am in grad school for. She ran across my name in PubMed or something. Koinkidinks all around.
• I saw a review of a book by a an old friend, and e-mailed her just as she was having her second child. For a few months we had a lot to say to each other. It was nice while it lasted - but we really had nothing in common with each at the time. I may e-mail her again someday, or she me. What came out of it was more lasting: friends she still knew, and friends I still knew, neither of which still knew each other, got a bridge to each other via our communication. So it petered out for me but reconnected other folks. I'm not sorry I took the chance
• >>bioinformatics *blinks* what is that, the art of informing biological entities? informing them of what? their rights? modern life confuses me