Every so often I think I should get around to figuring out how one goes about deleting an account from Friendster. I joined up at some point back in the dark ages of 2003 or whenever Friendster was the hot new thing, had some fun adding friends, and then promptly forgot about the whole thing except that every once in a while I get an email telling me that someone on Friendster has sent me a message.

50% of the time it’s some random person I have never heard of who wants to have incredibly stupid, poorly-spelled cybersex. 25% of the time it’s someone from high school who I didn’t like then, don’t care about now, and don’t have the slightest desire to talk to. Another 20% of the time it’s someone from college and the same rules apply. Most of the remaining times, it’s an email from an ex who occasionally gets drunk and maudlin, watches PBS documentaries that remind him of me, and sends me messages to apologize for being a git lo these many years ago. (Although to be fair, I think we finally reached some mature level of closure the last time that happened, and since then there have been no awkward drunken Friendster messages.)

But then every once in a very very long while, I’m actually glad I still have a profile there, because someone I actually regret losing touch with manages to find me, and it’s a nice little bright spot in an otherwise cold and snowy day. This was one of those days, when I heard from an old high school friend. I haven’t written back yet because I’m actually so pleased to hear from him that I’m tempted to try to catch up on eight years’ worth of silence in one email, and I am trying to suppress that impulse lest I scare or bore him with an incredibly long, incredibly dull email. But there are so few people I remember fondly from those days, that it’s making me really happy to hear from one of them and find out that he seems to be well and happy and generally having a good life.

I am a terrible correspondent, so I have no illusions that this will turn into a proper keeping-in-touch sort of arrangement, but it’s nice to get a bit of an update on someone who was once a really good friend. Besides, his email reminded me of the time I was accused of being a drug dealer by the director of a play I was in, because it was dress-rehearsal week and I gave some caffeine pills to an equally-exhausted friend. That memory alone provided the best laugh I’ve had all day. I spent a great deal of time actually drunk during the rehearsals of that play, chugging vodka from a water bottle backstage, and never got called on it. But my over-the-counter caffeine pills nearly started a riot. Ahhh, suburban New Jersey hypocrisy…