It’s true. I’ve been waiting for years for the perfect blog to use that lil’ gem of a title. And ladies and gentlemen, that blog has arrived.
Many of you may know of the tale of the girl I dated after I was a crew chief. She’s the one I referred to in the Dating Dues and Donuts post…
How about the girl I broke up with by telling her “Goodbye” when I dropped her off at the dorm right before summer break? I thought it was closure, she thought I was insane.
Honestly, I think I’ve always felt a might bit guilty about breaking up with her. I can’t say that I remember having a good reason, a bad reason, or any reason really at all.
I do however remember that she didn’t take it very well. It started with her cutting off her hair and sending it to me in the mail, and went quickly down hill from there.
Now, I really have no intention of trying to make her sound like a nut case. It was 12 years ago, and her freshman year of college. I simply want to paint the picture for what happened tonight.
That little thing over there on the right is called meebome. It’s a nifty little flash app put together by the kind folks at meebo for your chatting pleasure. If you type in the flash window, it’ll send me a message the next time I log in to meebo. Pretty cool huh. If I’m online at the time, we can actually have a conversation through the little guy.
So tonight, while playing with a tiddlywiki page that I’m working up for my new programming paradigm, I happened to log back in to meebo to be greeted with the following message:
Wow. Never thought I’d read another [Fuwjax] post. It’s [Her Name]. I read Dos and Donuts of Dating. I sure hope you didn’t pull that “Goodbye” crap twice. If that was in reference to me, I never thought you were crazy. Just me. I was crazy. I’m so sorry to read about your Mom. Very sorry. Google me. You’ll find me if you want to. Nice hearing from/reading about you again. [Her Initials]
Now, that was quite a message to come home to. I haven’t spoken with her for a very very long time. The last time I even tried to find out how she was doing was right after 9/11 just to make sure she wasn’t doing anything that might make her leave DC for New York or the Pentagon.
I have to admit, I probably wouldn’t have even bothered searching for her if she hadn’t said “You’ll find me if you want to.” Sounded a little like a challenge, and I can’t go turning down a good challenge.
It’s not the first time I’d ever Vanity Google’d someone. We’ve all done it. In fact, I’ve actually seen people post up lists of names of old friends just so that when those people vanity google, they’ll see the list and contact the person.
Anyway, I googled her name. Tons of hits. Nearly all of them referencing some article about people planning for retirement. In the result blurb for each of those pages it said something about a lawyer. She’s no lawyer, and I quickly realized just how much of a challenge it was going to be. I was going to have to wade through page after page about some article on a lawyer who happened to be the only other person on the planet who shared her name.
I found a page about her job in DC and went in search of her there. But I couldn’t find any mention of her for the past few years having any sort of job in the capitol. So I kept hunting in the google results and happened across a law school newsletter dated 2004 somewhere around result page 17. Suddenly all those lawyer pages I’d been skipping didn’t seem so unlikely. I’m not kidding you though, I went back and counted, only 6 results in the 170 were something other than a reference to that newspaper article.
Sure enough, there were too many coincidences for it to be someone else. She’d only been a lawyer for a few years. She had the same hometown and the same age. It was her, no doubt about it.
And she was doing very well. The article was a case study about her financial situation. Let’s just say the article made it very clear that with her six figure salary and her tidy little savings for a new house, those little law school debts wouldn’t take her long to pay off.
There are lots of movies about people running back into their ex’s after a long time just to find them happily married, financially stable, exciting job, nice home, blah blah blah. I should have suspected that when I finally got a “Look At Me Now” story, it’d be from reading a syndicated newspaper article that wound up on 170 different websites.
Posted with : Carbon 14