I had an "I'm getting old" moment today. My friend Shane and I were talking about MySpace for some reason and he was talking about profiles of people he graduated from high school with. I've only had a MySpace account for a short time. I've heard so much about it I simply had to check it out to see what the big deal was. I love the whole "Web 2.0" thing and MySpace is part of that movement. MySpace has a limited appeal to me but I can see why people dig it so much, especially the younger people that I'm not a part of any longer. Oh, kids these days. Anyway, I thought I'd try to do the search where you can find profiles of people you went to high school with. Interesting.
High school itself was not that great for me. I had some good times in that part of my life (I guess) but it was pretty lame overall. I was a dorky, rocker, goof-ball with zero self confidence. That's the making of good times right there. Oh and the acne. Let's see, what else? I weighed 65 pounds or something like that. Girls only talked to me to get me to help them with their test or homework. I acted like I wanted to keep it that way. Half of friends in those days were the kids that got into trouble. I remember Martin. He was expelled for setting the locker on fire. He also sold LSD made a bomb and brought it to school. He showed it to me and I remember telling him that he should probably not show too many people. He's almost certainly in prison now. I had a few other friends that didn't make it graduation. Fortunately my best friends through my senior year more or less stayed out of trouble enough to go to junior college with me. I'm off on a tangent again....
So I sat down this morning and did the search for people that graduated from Oakmont in 1989. Ready to be flooded with memories (good, bad and mostly indifferent) I started down the list. What are these people going to look like now. Are they married? Are they gay? Are they fat? Bald? Do they have interesting lives now? As I open each profile for a closer look I was surprised that I didn't recognize these people. After looking at a few I double checked my search thinking I surely did something wrong. Nope. I quickly glanced at the school info as I opened the profiles, not trusting the search engine. Who's that ? Who's that? I went through all thirty or profiles and remembered two people. Two people! Many of the people I looked up had gone the same four years I did. I either didn't know very many people or my memory is horrible. I sat in hundreds of hours of classes with most of the people I graduated with at some point. The good news is that is doesn't make a bit of difference but I was very surprised. It was almost twenty years ago but still.

