It seems that Dave Hosier, who was in most of my classes in high school, has a blog now. Dave not only engages in one of my favorite procrastinating pastimes, Googling random people one knows/knew, but he's helping me out by sticking them (or should I say us?) up on his website. I think he thinks I'm a bit of a freak, as he seems to be rather conservative, unsurprisingly (not that I remember ever having a political discussion with him or anyone else in high school except Rich, but considering that we grew up in Sussex County, the reddest county in our blue state, where about 10% of registered voters are Democrats, it's hardly against the odds). But that's okay; I can forgive almost anything to someone from high school with an interesting and well-written blog (I'd probably keep reading anyway thanks to my natural curiosity-- plus goodness knows I keep following all of the other 15,000 blogs I've ever laid eyes on-- but it being a good read in and of itself is a plus).

Unfortunately for both of us, finding our classmates online is hard work, which baffles me a little bit. I am probably the most Google-able of anyone in our class (except Jenny, if you remember to search under Jenny Owen Youngs, but I'm half-inclined to say being a musician is cheating). I really do not understand how I can accumulate 40+ web mentions in the course of my daily life, while I'm hard-pressed to find anything at all on 90% of other people I search for.

It's a real shame, too, since my natural curiousity about the lives of folks I knew way back when (way to sound 40 instead of 23, Britt!) is compounded by the fact that I rarely go back to Sussex County or talk to most of the people I knew there. (Moving 700 miles away, with parents moving 250 miles away, can do that.) Rich catches me up on the gossip occasionally, but mostly, it seems like a whole other world, quietly tucked away in the middle of nowhere. Nowadays when I'm asked where in NJ I'm from, I always answer "Oh, just way up north, nowhere you'd know"-- even when a fellow New Jerseyan presses and I mention the county by name, they usually just smile and nod in a blank sort of "Yeah, the name sounds vaguely familiar" way. I was actually really excited the other day when I got asked, "Oh, is that near Sparta?" It's hard to explain... it was this rare acknowledgement that yes, the place I lived for seventeen years does actually concretely exist. Don't laugh; it seriously feels like a parallel universe sometimes.

So anyway, what I was getting at is that Googling from afar would be ideal, if people could actually manage to get their names all over the web! I really am interested in what people are up to, in a genuine albeit not terribly intense sort of way. I was kind of disappointed that we're not having a five-year reunion... we're at such an interesting age right now! We're working, in grad school, married, engaged, buying homes, and probably at least a couple of folks have babies already. But I guess I've just got to wait five more years. Or hope that people start doing more web-worthy stuff. Or that all their counterparts with identical names get name changes, or something, so I don't keep getting thousands of results and (momentarily) wondering things like, "Did Mike Osorio become a brain-damaged murder witness? Or a unicycling Marine?" Alas, I don't think the world is going to indulge me. But hey, at least now I know what one more person is up to.

(By the way, the picture deserves a bit of explanation-- that's my room in the house I grew up in, the place I slept for fifteen years. No, when it was mine, it wasn't pink-- that's the work of our last tenants and their little girl. I snapped the picture while we were working on the house inbetween tenants, and it's about the only picture actually taken in Sussex County out of the 1,800 on my computer.)
  ¶ 10:32 PM