Tonight, in between bouts of Differential Equations (just like bouts of the fever, but less fun), I had a conversation with a friend I hadn't talked to in almost 4 years now. I mentioned her briefly when I was talking about [the difference a semester makes], and was thinking about her again last night during a period of insomnia in which I couldn't force myself to do homework. I found her via the magic of Google across the span of the Internets, via a Psych 335 class photo (I won't link out of respect), which led me to learn she's been at College at the University of Evansville, which led to a school email which led to a post on Lakeside Poetry's forums, which led to her LiveJournal. Now, before you accuse me of stalking, this was mere boredom on my part and was actually a fairly quick progression once I opened up Google. (I have this odd habit of multi-tasked searching, which meant I was often following false leads and good ones simultaneosly, and thus I would say the above took maybe 10 minutes.)

The remainder of my insomnia was spent reading her LiveJournal, which was like any other LiveJournal in the very contextual posts that are occaisionally tough to decipher outside of a certain social group. Even then, it was interesting to see the progression in which she moved from being what I remembered of her to what she is now. I actually predicted such a progression, at some point in the past, and so I wasn't too surprised by it.

It's almost funny, but she sounded like she had surrounded herself with people like me (passed a Something Awful test with a friend of hers, via her IM). This interests me because I so recently realized how much I missed surrounding myself with someone like her, and thus I went to see a play two Thursdays ago, and I keep ending up at the campus City Cafe, just to have crappy small talk with a cute woman named Candice. (I'm fearful to bring it much past small talk, perhaps the Drunk Brent, "Lemonade", is right and I do have self-esteem issues.) Does this mean that I actually want to surround myself with her, again, though? Am I seeking her out of desperation, or out of the simple want to rekindle an old friendship?

I've been thinking about that some as I finally finished up my DE homework. I believe that it really is truly the simpler of the two. I had spent three years in college under the assumption that I would never see any of my friends from high school again. Listening to my college buddies talk about their high school friends can sometimes give that a sense of loneliness. As I wrote in "[The difference a semester makes...]", I realize in retrospect that I probably did have my deepest friendship in high school with her. It was completely platonic, again because it had to be and I was all sorts of naive at the time, and so I've never really thought about me, her, and sex. Just reading her blog and thinking of her and sex was an interesting journey. (I presupposed it, I guess, but that doesn't make any of the (even LJ oriented) details any easier to consider.)

Again, no, I believe it was the simpler reason that I was just looking to write to someone I hadn't written to in a while, and it was not some stupid and desperate ploy for anything other than conversation. I realize that I did it largely as an excercise in networking. If there is one thing that this school semester seems desperate to teach me over and over again is that power of networking. One portion of the lesson that I've been reminded of again this semester is that it helps to have conversations with as many women as possible, even those I don't see as potentials for partnering (most guys classify women as either potentials or not, it's not sexism but evolutionary biology), because it only furthers your networking. (I forget sometimes how far the female social network travels.) I'll have further articles in this series over the course of the next few days...