So, I'm home alone on a Friday night, surfing around myspace, you know, like usual!!!

No, my cousin wanted me to set up some HTML for her since I am the family's token web monkey. To view the changes, I got an account, and figured I'd fiddle around while I was there.
Now, I'm on friendster, I'm on xanga, I'm on just about every flash-in-the-pan OMG I remember you! THX 4 teh add! website, just because some person I cared about was on it, and since they don't feel like shelling out for a real website, I am forced to logon to these wacky sites to catch up on their lives.

Every once in a while, I run across a familiar face from my past, and it never ceases to amaze me.

I think I'm right at the cusp of this whole internet thing, and I know people my age and older can relate. In high school, use of computers was pretty much limited to one class (freshman year) which was mainly spent teaching the lummoxes who slipped through the private school cracks what a mouse was and how to distinguish it from a real live mouse.

We didn't even have keyboarding. I mean, I can't imagine what school must be like for the kids now, where everyone has a website, and whoever gets the most eprops is the prom queen or something.

So you can imagine how strange it is to re-meet these people on cyberspace.
Yeah, I've googled a bunch of them before, but I never really came up with anything, which never surprised me. It's like a yearbook that just keeps updating with static pictures that are slowly getting older. It's not real interaction, but it's not staying in the past.

When I went to the Swiss Semester reunion, I learned a very interesting lesson. No matter how much you think you've matured and grown into an adult with a personality and a comfort in yourself, you can't escape who you were defined as around those who defined you.
I was so excited to knock everyone dead with my college-learned outgoing personality, my stand-up-gained self-confidence, my new, comfortable adult self, but I got there and realized I wasn't fooling anyone.
Around them, I was still the shy odd girl who occasionally speaks up but then it's in a really awkward way and why did I fly out here to want to go hide somewhere?

And they wonder why I don't show up at the high school reunions.
Well, my mom does.
I wonder if people have googled me and been like, "This is the same girl who had a crush on Emilio Estevez and didn't play at recess because she hated everyone and wrote that snarky article about inappropriate sports funding for our school, and she's not fooling anyone."

Me likey bouncy! Me likey bouncy!
No...no, you're a big girl now.