Jackie Danicki

When I was a kid, one of my favorite things to do was pore over my dad’s high school yearbooks. I’d get him to tell me old stories about the people in the pictures, and was always disappointed after all the laughs to hear that he didn’t keep in touch with any of them. (He’s going to his 40th high school reunion this year, and I wish so badly that I could tag along. I have some of those faces burned into my memory at this point, and I’m dying to see what everyone looks like now.)

So Ben’s post on the vastly larger networks of the Facebook generation got me thinking about all this. Our class of 100 students, which graduated in 1995, didn’t really have a proper 10 year reunion; a few people organized a get-together at a local bar, and only a handful of people showed up (I wasn’t one of them). A lot of classes have one person who keeps in touch with everyone, and people just go through him or her if they want to reach someone specific. Now, with Facebook, that person is made redundant. (Our class didn’t have one of those people, as far as I can make out - hence the backroom ‘reunion’.)

I got an email on Friday night, via MySpace, from a guy who was the first friend I made on the first day of freshman year of high school. By the time we were seniors, in 1995, our school had internet access and we learned about email and the web (such as it was) in a computer operations class. Two memories from that class:

1) The aforementioned guy and I would ping each other emails (we used the Pegasus client) all through class, from across the room, until our teacher snarled at us to knock it off.

2) My friends Nikki and Brigitte and I were exploring the web when we happened upon the website of some random guy who said that his hobbies included “getting naked”. Our teacher was standing over us, and we BEGGED him to let us click the hyperlink on the words “getting naked”. For some reason (he was a really strict teacher and pretty religious outside of school), he said we could click the link…and a picture of this naked guy with a gigantic hot pink you-know-what came up. The three of us screeched and threw a fit, totally grossed out. Our teacher just laughed at us. It’s oddly satisfying to remember exactly what my first taste of icky online nudity was.

Filed under: Life