Every once in a while, I use Google for something other than keeping dibs on Madonna, monitoring the latest political polls or trolling for my own name—I look up people I used to know. It's fascinating times 10 how easy it is to find some, and how invisible others seem to be. If you're not Google-able, I almost wonder if you're a vampire or something.

The U of C...so warm 'n' fuzzy.

Recently, I Googled an acquaintance of mine, Jeff, from my University of Chicago days. We were never "friends," but we got to know each other a bit in a poetry class in my junior or senior year. But our real introduction was to have taken place when we were freshmen—his uncle had let my dad know Jeff would be attending the U of C along with me and suggested we look each other up. Hm. A coach was telling my coach dad that his jock nephew and I should meet up—this seemed like the kind of association I was escaping from back in Michigan, not the kind I was hoping to find by moving to The Big City.

I passed.

But I kept the slip of paper with Jeff's name on it and I remembered it when we shared the poetry class, where he proved to be an upbeat and enthusiastic person to read in front of/listen to. I won't get into the specifics of his story because it's his and not mine, but the end result is that I wrote a poem based on my vividly imagined perception of how his life might be and I didn't find out for years that I'd hit the nail on the head. Among other things, he was gay, though in the closet throughout college.

If only I'd called him, we might have both had an understanding pal from Day One instead of however long it took me to find Zafar and however long it took him to find whoever he eventually found (possibly his now-partner was his first gay friend).

Flash forward, and we're eating together, catching up. I'm blogging this because I highly recommend doing something similar—as long as you're sure the person you're hunting down has any interest in seeing you again!—because while we didn't get too intense, just being in a situation where I was boiling down my life of the past 15+ years out loud to someone was quite touching. I've got nothing to deeply regret or anything, but nobody is 100% satisfied with how they live their lives except for non-thinkers...so let's see if I use this pleasant experience to tweak the aspects of my life that I found it a drag to say out loud.