Old Friends On MySpace

I recently got in touch with an old friend from high school via Myspace. I had set up a page ages ago then promptly ignored it since MySpace seems to be mostly filled with teenagers, pedophiles and people with a truly awful design sense. Frankly, I have no interest in interacting with any of them.

I had filled my page with nonsense and idiotic "facts" — I describe myself as being an 8'11' bodybuilder who majored in Geniusosity at MIT, for example — so it's no surprise that no one would ever be able to find me there even if they were actually looking. Besides, the only thing MySpace ever did for me was generate about five or six emails a day from hot, young "ladies" who were just dying to show me their tits. In the end, I let the page languish. My only Myspace friends were Jared, Jordon (another pal from college), and the site's founder, who's everyone's buddy and kind of creepy looking. Frankly, I didn't care. There are plenty of other internet distractions (not to mention real life) to worry about.

Then I joined Linkedin, which is a social network for professionals and obsessives (and obsessive professionals) who want to maintain contacts spanning their professional and collegiate careers. As a means of organizing your work history and keeping, at the least, contact information with friends old and new, it's fairly effective (providing you put in the time necessary to reconnect with people who may or may not want to connect with you). I've put forth a middling amount of effort, periodically checking to see if new people from my former companies or alma mater whom I might know have signed up. I've still got less than 100 contacts. Some folks have thousands. They're the obsessive ones and are clearly more ambitious and successful than me.

As a means of reconnecting with old college friends without appearing to be a creepy cyber-stalker, Linkedin is pretty good. After all, we live in interesting times and I know from painful experience that a job and/or company can disappear in the span of a few hours depending on whether the CEO felt like escaping to the Caymans that morning or not. Maintaining contacts at least feeds the lie that you have a backup plan should you get shit-canned tomorrow. Old beer-funnel buddies might at least be able to put in a good word with HR should you find yourself standing on the sidewalk with a box full of pens, "awards" and fake "don't fire me" family photos. The only drawback with LinkedIn is it doesn't do High School. After contacting a bunch of my old college friends, I got the urge to take a stab at tracking down a few select folks from that most odd and skewed time of life.

I guess the founders of LinkedIn rightly assumed that the vast majority of professionals lose contact with their high school crowd after college. People move on. It's part of the modern human condition. They move away, take jobs out-of-state, get married and make babies. Their parents might retire to sunny Florida, thus eliminating their reason to visit their childhood town. After a few years of adulthood, all that stuff that seemed so dramatic and important when you're 17 really isn't. Intentionally or not, things fall by the wayside when you have to pay the mortgage. Myspace effectively fills that void. Judging by endless alarmist news reports, it seems to be the perfect forum for former and current high school kids to hook up, harrass and electronically create (and recreate) all the nostalgia and drama that made that time so unforgettable, unbearable and dumb.

I wasn't all that surprised when an advanced search for people from Commack High School (1982 to 1988) turned up only a few dozen results of folks who I may or may not have been friends with. My age group may be the initial video game generation, but we're pre-internet and thus not nearly as well represented on sites such as MySpace as folks 10 or more years younger. And through a 20+ year memory filter, it's often hard to tell who anyone is, since Myspace only returns first names, and age can often make a person unrecognizable through a photo ID, should they choose to even use one.

Even so, I more or less recognized ten or so former classmates, so I sent out invites figuring it would either amuse or horrify them. So far, three have accepted and one even wrote back. She seems to be doing great. She moved to the Mid-west in the early 90's, is now married and has two beautiful kids. Amazingly enough, she looks practically the same as I remember her, except for her new 21st century hairdo. Somewhere in the back of my mind, I expect everyone to stay frozen in time and maintain their bad 80's hairdos. She even has a photo posted from 1985 of herself and a few other people I was friendly with. Everyone looks like babies. Thankfully, I'm not in the photo, since the years have not been nearly as kind to me as they have been to her. Besides, do I really need my wife seeing a photo of me from 21 years and 40 lbs ago? It'll only remind her that her husband was at one time NOT a bloated, hairy 39 year old monster.