Old friends.

Finding things about old friends from high school online is an interesting experience. The particular situation of which I speak is probably unique to a range of only a few years. Those high school classes that graduated before the ubiquitousness of email addresses and blog sites but are still young enough to employ these tools with the proper amount of aptitude are probably pretty few (?). So when I find stuff online about people I haven't spoken to in years, it seems both foreign and familiar all at once.

And everyone seems really exciting at first. Websites that try to round up 600 students for an eventual class reunion provide at best a couple paragraphs for you to summarize the last nine years of your life. When you're running through the highlights, it's great. Some people turn out exactly like you thought they would, others not so much. But either way you're getting only the very highest lights of their lives. It's a trip.

I bet if we knew exactly what their lives were like, we'd yawn and move on. Not to say anyone's really boring, but particulars don't excite in the same way. My situation in life is really exciting, my day today is not. Blogs do a good job of filtering the minutae and bringing (hopefully) just the interesting stuff.

I see lots of summaries from past friends and acquaintences. I want to contact them all, see how things are going. But deep down I think it would get boring in a hurry and then I'd feel obligated to keep the communication going past any significant point. It's a bummer too. I bet they're all really great. They should all have blogs I guess.