mangosteen | Nostalgia just kicked your ass. Film at 11.

Sometimes it's the things you swore you'd never care about.

My father and my little sister stopped to visit me as they were heading from Maine back to New York, and dropped off some of my stuff that was still cluttering up the family compound.

I also received a out-of-print CD the I bought from someone on eBay. Specifically, "Box Frenzy" by Pop Will Eat Itself.

So I'm sitting in a nice warm room, comfy chair, really good music playing in the background, and I start going through the stuff.

Talmud books..... check.
First Day Cover stamp collection..... check.
UCSC Banana Slug t-shirt..... checkity-check.
High School Yearbook... che--

High. School. Yearbook.

EEEEEYYYYYYAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGH!!!!!!!!

This is up there with "train wrecks" and "gruesome multi-vehicle accidents" on the Repulsed Yet Strangely Intrigued Hit Parade. So I start looking. The yearbook is from the early nineties, and the South Shore of Long Island. This pretty much means "big hair". Lots of it. File under "Gobs, Huge Seething." Enough Aqua Net to punch a suburb-size hole through the ozone layer. Ah well, that was the reality of my surroundings.

I started looking through the actual pictures of my classmates, and I found myself repeating a few words in my head every time I looked at a picture of someone I remembered for some reason.

Please tell me you got out, at least for a little while.
Please tell me you didn't stay trapped on Long Island.
Please tell me that you've gotten a little bit of perspective outside the burbs.
Please tell me you've done something amazing.
Please tell me you're not dead.

Fortunately, with modern technology, there's a way to confirm some of these things.

Observation: With efficient web search engines, it's intriguing to know that one way to achieve anonymity nowadays is to have a fairly common name and hide in plain sight.

So I started looking. I didn't find much. I did find one person (who I didn't get along with at all) who is currently doing economic models for developing nations' infrastructure, as well as field work in that vein. Another, is doing ecology work down in the Florida Everglades. All I could say is "Thank you. Thank you for doing something cool."

A lot of the other people I found on-line never left Long Island, as far as I could tell. The tricky part about Long Island is that it's the most insidious kind of trap. Much like the Zen Master who makes sure the bird doesn't fly away by making it so comfortable that it doesn't want to leave, Long Island is miles and miles of perfect suburbs. Reasonable property prices, good school systems, a very functional rail system that can get you to work in the morning (if work is in NYC), et cetera, et cetera.

Nothing much else, though.

You either get incredibly sick of it by the end of high school, or you don't. If you do, you invariably leave, even if it's just moving several miles west to Manhattan or the outlying boroughs. If you don't, well, you can live your whole life there. A lot of people do.

I left Long Island because I wanted to live a bigger life than that.
I hope I am.