Nostalgia, circa twenty-aught-five

Recently, Mike and I were watching a fun little show on the Travel Channel called Amazing Vacation Homes (some of which are amazing, and I can't understand why their owners don't live there full time. A few can be seen here). Cue commercial, cue theme music, and before I can figure out why, cue a thousand memories of my years on the debate team in high school. Somehow, the amazing They Might Be Giants have branched out to television tunes, and their theme sent me down memory lane. It seems only fitting, that one of the quirkiest musical groups I've ever known should be asked to do a song for a show about quirky houses. What is truly unfortunate, however, is that because of the way my brain works I am stuck with Birdhouse in your Soul playing endless loops in my head, which in turn has led me to dream about debate tournaments. I even found myself grouping topics as "Ads" and "DAs" as I took notes in my genetics class yesterday. Believe me, if I could suppress this reaction I would; by the time I graduated, debate was one of my least favorite activities at school and I would rather not remember it (fabulous partner aside). Why didn't I quit, you ask? I was, and still am, unable to stop doing something when other people are counting on me to do it.

Speaking of fabulous debate partners, I believe I will forward a copy of this post to my former partner, Plucky Duck, because she was the person who introduced me to TMBG back in the day. Of course that's her real name! This all might seem fairly ordinary to you, but in fact it isn't. You see, I haven't actually communicated with Ms. Duck in several years, yet I can quickly reach her by email. How, you ask? I, dear readers, am an internet spy. It gives me a great deal of secret pleasure to find out the current life status of people who may or may not remember who I am and who are almost certainly not sitting around wondering what I'm doing with my life. It's another side effect of sitting in front of a computer all day with nothing to occupy my time. I'm forced to invent little games for myself, like "I wonder what my lab partner from AP Biology class is up to?". As it happens, she's got a Medical Degree from Harvard. How about my best friend from the 5th grade? She just finished her PhD. Does this make me a stalker, I wonder? I don't DO anything with this information, it just scratches the itch of curiosity. The information is public, and I'm certainly not paying for anyone to "check up on them". My big brain demands answers, and like I said, I can't say no when something is expected of me.

{Before you think I really am a stalker, I should say in my defense I've looked up a total of about 5 people. Most of them are lawyers, and lawyers are registered in a big public database because they're certified professionals with unique areas of expertise. They're very easy to locate, if you know that they're lawyers to begin with. The others have a googleable public web presence. No prying was actually involved in finding this stuff.}

So anyway, Plucky, I hope you stop by here sometime and say Hi. It would be good to hear from you. We can talk about our salad days and wax nostalgic for when CDs were a novelty and you had the first Macintosh computer on the block.