Not a night goes by, I don't dream of wandering.

My little format of putting a quote up on the top of posts makes sense when I'm commenting on movies or other entertainment, but gets a little tough when I go off on tangents (like I'm about to.) But I have some music on in the background and just as I was thinking about it that appropriate lyric came up.

I'm not sure why, but I've been getting all nostalgic over the last few weeks. I think it has a lot to do with moving. When I moved I ended up looking through all this stuff I've kept around and remembering people I used to know - but have lost touch with now. I really appreciate our modern world where we can go all over the place and move to different and new places. But there's a casualty there too - we don't have the same stable communities humanity has traditionally had. There are all kinds of people I used to know that I may very well never see again. There's something tragic about that.

On the other hand the advance of technology has done great things for allowing us to stay in touch. Granted, people didn't used to move around as much as we do now - but when they left they were typically gone for good, never to be seen or heard from again (think two hundred years ago when people set out for the America's from Europe as an example.) But today we have airplanes, and cheap cross country telephone rates, and email, and the ultimate in finding lost friends: Google.

So I just did the ultimate in the freakshow world of googling people (I love it when we turn nouns into verbs.) I was thinking about friends from High School who I had aboslutely no idea where they are these days. So I decided to google a couple of them. Here I am with my yearbook out, looking up names. I found some, didn't find others. It was fun, and the whole excercise actually has me looking forward to my High School reunion - 10 years in sneaking up fast.

But is all of this really something healthy. Yeah, it would be cool to find an old friend that lives near me now, that's a sustainable friendship. But I have a hard enough time keeping up with friends who are flung all over everywhere as it is. Do I need to add more on? If I could devote my life to travelling and maintaining firendships that would be great. Modern technology allows us to do amazing things, just this weekend I flew to San Jose for a friend's party - I was in and out in 15 hours and the whole trip was a piece of cake. But while I was there seeing old friends it just reminded me that I need to go down for longer, see more people.

In the end I don't want the friends I now keep up with from college to turn into those friends from high school that have become lost to me. I'd rather go the other way and get some of those old friends back. But at a certain point you just have to live your life in the present - if I'm going away all the time to keep up with old friends what happens to my new friends here in Seattle? I guess it's a balancing act we all need to work on.

Almost makes me wish for the old days, with a stable community where people mostly stay put. But not really; I've enjoyed living in three states, and meeting all of the great people that comes along with it. Something makes me think that one static community would get old for me, I'd want to break out. I could be that guy that goes off and is never seen or heard from again. And that would certainly be worse then where I'm at today.

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