Old Girlfriends and the Internet

I was talking to a friend last week about the Internet and its effect on high school yearbook sales. (It's killing them.) Many students aren't buying them anymore mainly because they feel that with websites like MySpace and Facebook, what's the need? All of their memories are going to be online forever, right? Of course, the answer is probably not. Who knows what lies ahead for all things technology and Internet-related, but a book well taken care of will last about as long as you want it to. And your friends can't up and decide that some pics are too geeky and simply delete them. That said, I have no desire to ever look at my high school yearbooks again (too geeky), but I guess that I'm glad that they exist somewhere.

The better part of the conversation turned to how much easier it is for us guys to be found online by curious former classmates and friends than the ladies. Those maiden names tend to go by the wayside pretty quickly for the girls. But me? I'm a Beziat forever. If you can remember how to spell it for the search engine of your choosing, this blog is likely your first stop.

We decided that there were a couple of old flames that we wouldn't mind running into again, in a platonic nature, of course. The ones with whom we parted on good terms, the ones we wished well; it'd be nice to have even the briefest of friendly exchanges with them. The thing that keeps us from Googling some of these names is that decent guys like us don't want to take a chance of coming across as crazy stalkers. And if their names have changed, then it's likely that we put more effort into the search than the ten seconds it takes to enter the name as we remembered it. I think I'd be a bit wary if someone worked much at all to contact me. Or I'd be flattered. I guess it depends on the person.

Anyway, I'll just sit back and wait for my exes to contact me, should they so choose. I won't embarrass the (mostly) nice ladies by putting their names on here, but I'll just say that of the nine former flames I can think of right this minute, I would welcome emails from six. As for the other three? Um, well, you must have me confused with someone else.

[Edit to add: Should she go about Googling herself, she wasn't exactly a girlfriend, but she was a good friend and it would be nice to see how she's doing, Amy Sullivan would be a welcome visitor to my email or comments.]