• @popejephei I don’t accept patpal, but I do accept 3rd party pre-invasion checks. #
• @popejephei you don’t really want the gory details **before** you preach, do you? They’re not pretty. #
• @popejephei hey are Q and Allison on twitter? #
• @popejephei what is a "call to offering"? And by The Critter do you mean mine in specific or kids in general? #
• @jernst could be worse. Had a cabbie playing evangelical christian sermons at me once. That’s the surest way to no tip. Sorry about your dog #
• They’re sampling tilapia at costco$ seems wrong. #

A friend sat with the Critter tonight while J and I went for dinner and a movie (not in that order).  The dinner was Maya del Sol.  It was excellent.  The was our second trip and they didn’t disappoint.   I had halibut.  It was cooked perfectly, which is not always easy to find here on the third coast.

The movie was Baby Mama.  Not nearly as good.  It was OK, but if you’ve seen the commercial 2-3 times, you’ve seen most of the good parts.  I don’t want to spoil anything about it–the plot’s not bad–but I would think you could hold off on it until it comes out on DVD.

Ah, Zippy: you captured my mood clearly enough at the time that I photocopied this and faxed it to a friend 3000 miles away. He later moved another 3000 miles or so. I doubt it was in response to this fax, but you never know.

Post college was a challenge for me, as I struggled to figure out what I wanted to do. I worked at Mrs. Fields Cookes (still had the paystubs), an Austrian powder coating company, sold leather jackets, started Napkins By Reid (yes, as bad as it sounds), and worked on a wide variety of other business plans: Cafe Tomo–mini van based mobile espresso, World Wide Comics (also a non-starter, but it got me a free copy of Margot in Bad Town, which is still awesome) and an electronic BBS for the Washington State Japan America Society, corporate sponsored adventure travel. There were probably more. All within about 16 months.

Did I mention the bad, non-rhyming poetry? Hopefully that never surfaces.

Most of that stopped by the time I made it to Chicago in fall, 1992.

But the interesting thing is that I wasn’t even close to going through it all alone. The vast majority of the letters I had from friends at that time were similarly aimless.

A little aimlessness is probably good for the soul. We all seemed to find our way, more or less. I suppose it might come back (never say never, right?) but I’m pretty much hoping it was an “I’m 22 kind of thing”.

Oh, and to the 19 yo poetry major I spoke to the other day: I now remember the “midlife” crisis feeling you described. It won’t last. Something else will probably take it’s place in due time, but that’s another store.

OK, that’s it: enough with the indulgent nostalgia trip. I need to eat breakfast.

Given half a chance, I will tell any college student I run across that they should go abroad for their junior year (in fact, I did this on the way back from NYC the other day). Why? It can be just a great experience and although you college students may not believe me on this, such adventures require significantly more effort later in life. So, go.

How life changing can it be? Well, it can inspire you to carry around a Burger King place mat that a friend who went to Germany sent you in Japan. For 19 years. OK, maybe I’m a little extreme — and it’s going to the recycling shortly — but you get the idea.

One of the things I had completely forgotten about that pre-email* era was that we not only wrote letters to people, we also sent a wide variety of artifacts. If it could be mailed, we’d mail it. Now all that takes place digitally. That’s not a bad thing. Just a little different.

But it sure was fun to return home to the host family in Funabashi, Chiba, Japan, only to find an overstuffed envelope from West Germany (1989 — remember?) and open it only to find a BK place mat.

* ok we had email — even Internet email — but it was far from the ubiquitous means of communication it is today.

What started off as a basement cleaning lapsed into completely indulgent nostalgia when one of the boxes I thought I could simply shred turned out to contain a wide variety of memorabilia: letters, ephemera–that kind of thing.

Above–my acceptance into Kenyon. I don’t know if my high school grades would be good enough to get me in today. Maybe.

The other college I applied and was accepted to was Wooster. Reading over the letters, I know immediately why I picked KC: the letter from Wooster was almost completely impersonal. The one from Kenyon included a detailed description of why the chose me. Not that I decided this based on the letter, but that’s another story.

The letter didn’t mention grades, so maybe I could still get in. The AP European History class might stop me — my grade for the final quarter? 66. Yes, out of 100. I guess I’m doomed to repeat the 100 years war. (Get it? That’s my one history joke. You know–how if we don’t know our history we’re doomed to repeat it. Awesome.)

Anyway, it was pretty entertaining to Google a few people. Most I couldn’t find, but a couple generated hits that looked promising so I sent off a couple of get-in-touch emails, the kind that were more popular in, say, 1998, when the Internet was exploding. It would definitely be fun to connect, if only to play a round of “remember when…”.

Oh and I found stuff from the usual suspects lurking here: Yo Imintex, Meg & JDA.

Pretty much awesome.