This page contains a list of everyone I can think of who I lost track of, one way or another. It's the "lost:" section in my personal classified ads. This gets slightly more interesting, I promise...

Don't you ever wonder what happened to your best friend from the second grade? Or that almost-but-not-quite romantic interest who's number you lost in college? I do. Well, not necessarily those specific examples, but there are a lot of people I've known who have dropped off of the edge of my side of the planet. People pass in and out of our lives like traffic on a busy street. You'd probably be surprised at the number of people you've known (and liked) over the years who you will likely never see again. At any rate, I don't really expect to run into all of them in an airport. Then again, maybe that's what happens when you die: heaven is just a big airport where everyone you've ever known is coming in on an arriving flight...

Ok, ok, so maybe not everyone is as sentimental as I am. The truth is, I tend to regard the past with some seriousness. I take stock in the theory that who and what we are is the sum total of our experiences, and those experiences include the people we have known. Therefore, understanding our peers helps us to better understand ourselves. You might call it "social genetics"--the traits we inherit from others through interaction. I wonder if that term has already been coined?

The World Wide Web provides an opportunity for communication that has never before existed; this is quickly becoming universally realized [ed. note - this HAS become universally realized since I first thought about it in 1996, although of course I was not the first to think about it]. Search engines, fingering, and web links seemingly should reduce the randomness of chance encounter between ordinary persons. In other words, we may not all have access to the FBI's database, but more and more of us have the Internet at our disposal everyday. It is almost dizzying to try to imagine what twenty or even ten more years of Internet progress will do to the comfortable anonymity to which we have become accustomed. But I digress...the point is this: it'll be interesting to see how many of these people (if any) will actually turn up because of this page. A good search engine tweaked with the right parameters may land one of the people listed below on this page. Or, it may land someone who knows one of these people on this page, etc., etc. You get the picture...