It’s a Small, Small World

decent CL find
surprise blast from high school past
doesn’t make the grade

Even though I’ve basically sworn off CraigsList as a viable place to meet men, every so often I get the itch to head over there and see what’s there. Today was one such day, and I found a few decent posts to shoot emails to. My eye was caught by one guy who simply suggested we chat on Yahoo. I was game, so I sent him an IM. The chatting started off well, and then at one point I switched from the Yahoo Messenger application to the browser based version because messenger kept crashing.

It was there I noticed his invitation to add me as an online friend, complete with his full name. it looked similar to a name I knew from way back when. I did a quick look up on Facebook and yep, there he was, mutual friends with a bunch of folks I went to high school with.

In all my years of online dating I have never come across someone I knew from another area of life, let alone high school. I shoot him an IM, “Did you grow up around here?” He answers with “Yeah, Town A. You?“ It’s the town next to mine. I respond with “Town B. We totally went to high school together.”

As he starts in with the questions… What year? What was your name again? Didn’t you date what’s his face? I try to think whether I knew anything about him, “him” being the 17 year old version. It isn’t that I went to a large high school, mine was teeny tiny by today’s suburb standards, but we definitely weren’t friends and I had a hard time recalling anything more useful than him being on the baseball team.

We play the name game for awhile and it starts to seem like he’s interested in meeting up in person. I think it’s not a half bad idea, I normally shy away from what always seemed like the incestuous dating scene that a small high school breeds, but I don’t know this guy, not enough to hold being in high school with him against him, anyway. And what a great story it would make!

We transition to a phone conversation, but instead of getting to know each other in the here and now he descends into full blown reminiscing about high school. He’s obsessed with what I thought about him - only he phrases it as curious - but for the life of me I can’t actually remember. He doesn’t seem to accept that I don’t talk to anyone regularly, although it doesn’t seem he does, either. He tells me who he lost his virginity to, who he had crushes on, who is locker was next to…. It was the most painful twenty minutes of my life.

Mercifully he ended the call himself and after several proclamations about how we should get together sometime he hung up. That obviously won’t be happening, though. High school was a fun time but I don’t want to go back there. Neither should he... from what I can gather he wasn't any more sure of himself or socially successful than he is now. Who's too cool for school, now?