I Used to Have a Memory

Turn back to 1992: I was in grad school at UW-Madison. I had a rough first year there, since I was still reeling from having broken up with my first girlfriend at the end of college the year before. I was feeling pretty lonely and didn't feel comfortable in the new location. (Hmm, does this sound familiar? Yeah, I think it takes me at least a year to adjust to a new locale.)

At the time, I was still very active on the USENET newsgroups (a sort of precursor to Web-based message boards, for those of you who are newer to the net), and somewhere along the way I discovered alt.personals.

Okay, you need to realize that back then the whole world hadn't discovered the net yet. Most people on-line were either at educational institutions, or were in the technology business. There was a certain sense of unity and togetherness, for all that we all hated each other's guts. (Joke!) It also meant that you knew there was a certain lower bound on the kinds of people you were likely to meet. (At the time, it was still a source of much humor and some rankling that Penn State University had lowered the overall quality of people on the net by allowing all their students to have access, rather than just those in the technology departments. "PSU Strikes Again!" was a common sarcastic response to a particularly asinine post to a newsgroup.)

Someone on alt.personals had developed an anonymous posting service: You could post to the newsgroup anonymously, and someone could respond to you - also anonymously - through the service. It was pretty neat; it was entirely up to you whether you wanted to identify yourselves to each other. (It also had some interesting legal ramifications, which the APS guy tried to finesse by basing the site in Finland, which had very tight privacy protection laws, or so I understand.)

Well, it seems that Cindy had posted an ad to alt.personals, and had gotten dozens, if not hundreds, of responses. And apparently I was one of them. Which I can believe: I met at least two women I met through the group, including one in Madison and one in Ohio. Neither one was my type, although the one in Ohio was a good correspondent for over a year.

Well, Cindy says that she and I in fact met face-to-face. She was in school in Illinois, and her parents live(d) in Wisconsin, so she stopped in Madison on her way back to school and we had lunch at a nearby restaurant (the Wild Iris Cafe, at the time my favorite in town, but by 1997 it had gone so far downhill I stopped eating there). Apparently she even saw my apartment!

And you know, I have absolutely no memory of any of this. Well, I have this nagging thought in the back of my mind that maybe it's true, but nothing definite. Her photos on her site don't ring any bells for me, nor does anything else. It's very peculiar.

Sadly, I no longer have any of my e-mail from back then. I think great swaths of it got lost as I was transitioning out of the CS department and accounts for deleted. (I remember wrangling with the CS lab staff over this at some length.) It's too bad I wasn't keeping a journal back then. I wonder if any of my friends from the time remember me saying anything about this? It's quite possible that I was somewhat embarrassed by it (meeting someone over the Internet is considered strange now; it was positively scandalous back then) and didn't mention it to anyone.

The really bizarre part is that, from her bio, Cindy seems like someone I would at least remember. She's read science fiction, she knows who King Mob from the comic book The Invisibles is, she's intelligent, good-looking, and she's a geek! What the heck did we talk about that made all this slip through my memory? Did I act like such a clod that I just blocked it all out? It's totally whacked. (And how did she managed to remember me after all this time? Especially after getting a Ph.D., getting married, getting divorced, and moving to the east coast?)

The question of "why didn't we see each other again" is actually simpler to answer. From Cindy's end, it seems that when she got back to Illinois she met the guy she ended up dating for the next four years. From my end, I was still pretty much a mess: Not happy in school, not happy in Madison, didn't know what I wanted as far as dating went (hmm, the more things change...), plus I was probably pretty daunted by the prospect of dating someone who lived several hours' drive away. Those are all pretty good practical reasons, even if the question of how we actually got along has been lost to the mists of time.

It's not like this is A Big Deal, but I usually have a good memory for things like this. It's not so much that it bugs me, as that it's just very surreal. It's actually rather neat, in its way.

Anyway, it turns out that Cindy's journal is very well-written and entertaining. One of the better ones I've discovered in recent months, in fact. If you want to check it out, this is as good a place to start as any.

I bought myself a 250 Mb USB Zip Drive today, using my Apple discount. I already have a Zip Drive, but it's only 100 Mb, and more importantly it's SCSI, which means it is somewhat less convenient to move around, and it won't be compatible with any future Macs I buy, since SCSI is no longer standard on them. (Sure, I could buy a SCSI card, but I'd like to wean myself of that technology. USB is not as fast, but it is way more convenient.)

I'm also trying to figure out what the best way to invest my savings is, since I've basically given up on buying property out here in the foreseeable future. When I mean "best way", I don't mean what I should invest in (I have ideas about that myself), but I mean whether I should get a broker, use eTrade (which I have a free account for, as Apple uses it for their stock purchase plan), or some other on-line vendor. I keep hearing questionable things about eTrade, such as that they're slow to process buy and sell requests, and (worse yet) that they have security problems. But I don't know how much of this is true, or if the other on-line brokers are any better. Anyone have any ideas? Please either let me know or write about it in my forum.

By the way, Apple stock is up about 14 points in the last two weeks, which equals a fair amount of money for me. If we actually get up to around 100 in the next year or so, I may have to reevaluate whether or not I can afford to buy something out here. Weird!

I've instituted a few small changes in my daily routine recently.

One is that I've given up trying to push my wake-up hour earlier. I've always thought it would be neat to get up around dawn, or at least before 7, and have all the daylight hours to do stuff. But clearly since I hang around with night owls, that's not going to happen. So I've finally decided to set my alarm for 7:30 so I can actually get as much sleep as I can rather than waking up earlier and lying in bed for a while. I think it helps some.

The second thing I've done is resolve to get into the gym to work out at least three days a week: Monday, Wednesday and Friday. I've been trying to keep up with going every day and alternating weights and cardiovascular workouts on different days, but I find that by doing so I tend to go for about three weeks, and then take a week and a half off. I'd rather be going less frequently, but regularly.

One ramification of this is that I now do about 1/3 of my weight training each day, plus 20-30 minutes on a cardio machine. So for instance I do my upper body on Monday, my legs on Wednesday, and my arms on Friday. Plus I do my two abdominal exercises (the crunch and the twist) each time I go in. I've been keeping to this schedule for three weeks now and haven't missed a day. (I've had dreams of going in once on a weekends in addition to this, but it hasn't happened yet.)

For the past six months I've been trying to make positive progress in losing weight, but haven't had much success. Some of this may be due to my on-again, off-again routine. I dunno. Possibly I just need to actually make the leap to modify my diet - probably mainly by eating less sugar. On the plus side, I have been on the edge of tightening my belt a notch lately. So maybe I'm ready to start having some more positive results.

Also, for the last year I've been doing what John calls "pyramids" in my weight training. Basically this means that for each set I do on a machine, I bump the weight up but try to do fewer repetitions. For the third set I try to do as many repetitions as I can, but when I can do more than 6, then it's time to increase the weight. I think the theory here is that this helps build up muscle mass.

So, for the curious, here are the weights I'm currently on for the 12 machines I do regularly. I do 3 sets for all but the abdominal machines, where I just do 1 set (but a long set):

I'm on the cusp of moving up the weights on several of these machines. My hope is to finally break through to the next level on the shoulder press sometime this month.

Old Entry Update: I added some photos I took from my last two baseball games, on 7 August and 20 August, if you want to go see.