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August 10, 2009

Reminiscing

A few people have e-mailed me lately asking why I opted out of a recent high school reunion (20 years), or why I opted out of a recent college reunion. The answer is multi-part, but the primary reason is this: I am the most Google-able person in any graduating class I have been in.

Seriously. Type my name into any search engine, and my web site is the first result. I have one of the more unique names on Earth, and I've been creating content online since before the web was created. I've had my own domain since the early 90's, and I've had this domain since about 1995 or so, I've lost track. I live a high school and college reunion every day. My classmates get online, they go to a search engine, they type in my name, and bingo! I get this e-mail:

Hi, Ayse!!!! It's been soooo long! I can't believe I found you on the internet! I just got cable internet and looked up your name! What a blast from the past!! Remember when we did [thing]? I've been doing [things] and living in [place] and always wondered what happened to you!

Some of the pieces change, but it's pretty much the same thing. Some of these classmates stay in touch and we get to know each other again, in the cursory way you get to know somebody who hasn't bothered to stay in touch with you for twenty years, or even somebody you didn't know all that well to begin with. They add me as a Facebook friend, I return the favour. You know the routine. It's great, I love getting e-mail from people I actually know wanting to say hi, and it is nice talking to old friends. But it happens often enough that it's not as if I needed to go to a reunion to find out what happened to my old classmates.

Which brings me around to the next reason, which is that a lot of people just couldn't be bothered to stay in contact with me. It was about ten years after high school that I winnowed my contact list and thinned out the number of people I was willing to make an effort for. What I did was just stop keeping in touch with people who hadn't initiated a contact with me in five years. Despite my introvert nature, I have a lot of friends, some close and many more distant, and staying in touch takes time and energy on my part. I don't see any real reason to spend time or energy on people who can't be bothered to reciprocate when I could spend it on somebody who obviously does want my company. By definition, if one of my classmates hasn't bothered to even drop an e-mail saying hello, I see no reason at all to fly across the country to see them in person.

Which brings me to the third reason, which is that the timing of all the reunions in the last couple of years has conflicted with other things I wanted to do. Like the incredibly engaging series of seminars on building systems I took over the last three weeks (ask me about fire suppression). I already have planned travel back east for holidays later in the year, and we've had two unexpected and sad trips to Minnesota already this summer. We have an unbloggable but time-consuming event coming up in this week and possibly stretching on for more than a month. We have out-of-town guests, and family visiting. There are a few wool shows I want to go to, such as the Monterey wool auction this weekend. Then we want to actually have a little vacation together at some point, for the first time in years. Adding a weekend trip or two would require a really compelling reason.

And lastly, reunions aren't fun. The food is always terrible, there's always retrospective music (but pop, not the stuff I ever listened to) played too loud, and everybody wants you to play the role you had in high school or college. When I was at Smith I worked reunion weekend a few times, and nobody ever seemed to be having huge amounts of fun. The 5-year reunion I went to at Smith was OK, but I was getting over being seriously ill and I didn't need the extra stress of being around a bunch of people who hadn't treated me very nicely the first time around, even to see the ones who had been good friends. I had planned to stay an extra day and enjoy Northampton, then take the Peter Pan to the airport for old time's sake, but instead I called a cab and paid to change my flight because I just wanted to be home.

I go to Ithaca at least once a year. I visit Minneapolis regularly, too. Heck, we often drive across the country. I'm on Facebook and a dozen other social networking sites. I answer my e-mail relatively promptly. I think that's good enough.

Posted by ayse on 08/10/09 at 11:36 PM