Back to the Future

Even the best science fiction prognosticators had to kick themselves for not seeing this.

The cyberpunk movement of the 1980s saw a world of the near future, where technology, far from being the great savior of mankind, was merely an everyday tool, set in a near-future dystopia, mankind's baser motives on display. The near-future was cool, sheening, with its dark anti-heroes wearing mirrorshades, managing shady dealings with unsavory people, showing that while technology changes, man's baser self does not.

But they missed the Web, didn't they? They missed social networking, didn't they?

The web snuck up on us so quickly, and yet so subtly, that even as people like me can't imagine life without the web, and yet often underplay its impact on society. Inventions seem to be like that, right? Imagine the way the telephone changed society, who had been used to writing laboriously long letters, penned with care, traveling great distances over great time. It was a time when penmanship and wording mattered.

Sometime at the end of February, I must have crossed some mythic boundary, where I blogged here for the thousandth time. There's something about 1000, a round number in some base that was picked because our finger and our toes made 10 a special number, and man, who seems to crave patterns, found powers of 10 to be alluring.

The web, with its search engines, the key to the myriad of doors that would otherwise be impossible to navigate, allowed me to find people by dint of their name.

A few months ago, I found someone I had gone to college with. More recently, someone I went to high school and even junior high with.

I suppose I've seen Jack, the guy I went to high school with, far more recently than I saw Mike, the guy I went to college with. I'm sure we bumped into one another in Tennessee, when his family still used to live there, back some Christmas, in the early 90s, shortly after we had all graduated.

That's still edging close to 20 years ago.

It's times like this that I wonder, what the hell have I done these past twenty years. When I talked to Mike, he seemed wistful. He got married. He had kids. He made decisions. He's in a relationship, which entails compromise, the price we pay for a bit of companionship, maybe even love.

The movies never talk about that. They romanticize love, much like fairy tales, with Prince Charming rescuing Sleeping Beauty. Indeed, love is everything in these relationships.

But relationships in real-life is work. You would think movie makers and book writers could simply look at their own lives and find that it's more mundane than their stories would imagine, but so powerful is the myth of the perfect relationship that it ignores inconveniences like this.

Mike seemed to long for a time when life was idealistic, when he could do his own things. But he had made his decision long ago. Hours in the day were filled up tending to his kids, earning his keep, making payments. This was not the 1950s, where men could rule their household. He had someone else's opinion to consider...

Now that Jack and I have started talking to one another, and by that, I mean emailing one another again, I get a touch nostalgic.

Many nerdish types look at their high school experience with loathing. They remember thick-headed louts who had nothing better to do than torture them or make fun of them because they weren't cool enough. They remember hormones raging, how others seemed to get who they wanted, while they had to content themselves with longing.

I don't really recall that time period with either hate nor love. I was pretty awkward and shy, and knew a lot less of the world than I know now.

I remember Jack as being someone who looked like he was going places. He was interested in international politics. I didn't quite envision him as a politician, since he lacked the glad-handing and pure ambition that seems needed by anyone who wants to deal with media scrutiny. Maybe someone more behind-the-scenes, a technocrat, a policy wonk.

We'd mostly interact through people I was a little closer with. Initially, that was Nick, because Nick was a huge fan of D&D and video games, at least, until he became hooked by theater. Later, it was Ray, when Ray would invite us to his house where we'd watch Tennessee play some bowl game, and his mom would cook us a combination of Chinese dishes, and American desserts, and listen to his dad exhort the Vols to a win.

Through Ray, we'd play tennis. Ah, tennis. That is something that I really have to thank mom for. I'd played no sports as a kid, and I was reluctant to take lessons, but once my brother and I started, we were hooked. One day, prom night, senior year, Ray and I and Ronnie were out playing tennis.

Ronnie was a junior who had liked Evelyn (she's insane, as only Asian American girls rebelling against conservative dads are insane) and thought they would go to the prom. Evelyn, if I recall, when out with David to the prom, an unusual pairing, now that I reflect back. Ronnie was hitting as well as he ever did, fueled mostly by rage. Last I recall, Ronnie married an Indian girl, and that's getting close to 20 years ago.

Jack used to take a long time to warm up. 30-40 minutes of hitting before he felt he could play a game. Eugene used to play too. His serve was not so reliable, so he'd stand a few feet behind the baseline to knock a serve in. David would punch his serve skywards so it would clear the net by a bit, and land in the service box. We didn't know that much about tennis, but it was enough to play. We weren't Peter, who played on the tennis team. Something about playing on a team that encourages a kind of narcisstic self-importance.

Since college, I knew Jack had gone to South Carolina, eventually gotten his Ph.D. and at one point was teaching there. Then, it seemed, he had disappeared. I had thought he had gone to work at a private company. Indeed, I have no idea where a few other high school friends are now. Peter (a different one), Rob, Erik, who I used to lunch with frequently (they were all above 6 ft so they towered over me). Peter, I went to college with, but a year separated and a different major meant we didn't interact that much. For all I know, Rob's family still lives up the street from my parents.

But for some reason, the email for Jack still works, and so we've been talking a little. His life has gotten busy enough that we can't quite get as caught up as I'd like, but the good news is, unlike keeping up with other folks, Jack does try to send an occasional email back. You'd think, in a day where modern communication is so easy, this would be straight-forward. I recently made contact with a guy I went to grad school with. He sent email to two other people we knew trying to get together. That has fizzled, with no follow up.

With communication so easy, you'd think people would do it more. Certainly, this generation of teens use IM all the time, and they've learned, I suspect, to trim down what might be dozens of different people they want to talk to, to just a small number. Honestly, I have no idea how all that is managed.

IM seems like a defining moment. Folks of my age might use it a lot, or might not use it at all. In that respect, I'm one of the frequent users of IM, but I can see other people my age finding that technology a little strange (of course, I can really see people thinking Twitter is even stranger, and those are people ten years my junior).

While I'm thinking about high school and tennis and the intervening years, I realize I wouldn't have been able to get in touch with Jack had his name not been slightly unusual (Ray's name is nearly hopeless, and David's name is hopeless) so I could find it, and that the email was still good, and that Jack had some interest in keeping in touch.

I remember my brother, who loved to keep in touch with people, would send literally dozens of snail mails, and await replies. He discovered, perhaps not surprisingly, that women were far more likely to send replies than men, which has lead, not surprisingly, to my brother keeping in more contact with women.

(I also recall Jack had a younger brother, though I recall that he seemed quite different in personality to Jack).

Ultimately, these kinds of reunions, even virtual ones, are about a reflection of where we were then, and where we are now.

All that because the Web made finding people a lot less painful than it was before the Web.