Renewed Contact
One thing I'm very good at is performing menial tasks, like doing the dishes. (I have a dishwasher, but I do my dishes by hand because I don't generate enough by myself to be worth using the washer.) In my writing, this translates into being very good at reporting things, and that's what I sometimes this journal has mainly largely of: Fairly mechanical reports of what I've done each day.
So this evening I was walking home from the coffee shop trying to figure out what I should write today, since not a while lot happened. Then I realized that something has happened that I ought to discuss: I was contacted by a long-lost Internet correspondent!
Terry's a west-coaster, and we've never met. Other than that he's a delightful fellow and we quickly found our letters ballooning into 300-line opuses, he was also the first gay man I'd ever gotten to know (well, the first that i knew was gay). Ironically, we had exchanged biographies early in the correspondence, but I didn't receive his at first. After a few days, he wrote a short letter asking if he'd offended me in some way. I told him I'd never received it, and he sent me a new copy. Occasionally mail does get lost on the Internet, but this is the only time any mail I've sent or received has been lost with such "meaning" behind it!
I was pretty clueless about homosexuality and gay "culture" at the time - this despite the fact that my girlfriend was an activist feminist who claimed to be bisexual! I was not prejudiced against it, it just wasn't a part of my life experience. Terry observed early on that I was remarkably tolerant and accepting for someone who had previously been oblivious to the whole thing, and he said this suggested that I'm particularly comfortable with my own sexuality. (I was, and still am, quite happily straight, by the way.) Other people have since made similar remarks to me, and I've also learned that this leads some people to conclude that I'm gay or bi myself. (I have one friend who I'm pretty sure still believes that I'm really bi.)
Terry and I also talked a lot about the computer industry, Star Trek, and other subjects. He's about 10 years older than me, so he's been at a rather different point in his life than me. He also wrote a rather witty article about changing the symbols which represent the phonemes in English, which incorporated his suggested changes as he described each one. The essay was damned-near unreadable by the end. (As I recall, it was entitled "Ecstasy in Fuchsia".)
We eventually lost contact I think because I moved to go to grad school, and he moved to start a new job. A few months ago I poked around on the Web to find him, but he has a fairly common name, and I had no luck. I, on the other hand, have a fairly unusual name (do an AltaVista search on "Rawdon" and many of the entries you get will be my Web page), so he eventually tracked me down, and wrote to me yesterday. We've already exchanged several letters, and strangely enough, the size of each letter seems to be ballooning...
It's good to be in touch with him again.
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