penfield | Diurnal Excogitation

In my freshman year of college, I came down with a particularly brutal case of homesickness, pretty much right after my parents pulled away from the residence building. In high school, I had been a reasonably big fish. Not big enough to be "popular" or even "cool," but just big enough to be recognized, if not necessarily respected.

And I had the most comfortable of comfort zones, with a cadre of close-knit friends who danced -- sometimes literally -- to the same beat. You can call it a clique if you want. Maybe it was a clique. But it wasn't like were elitists or anything.

My first few weeks of college, not only didn't I have any friends, I didn't have any anything. My roommate never actually showed up, which meant I had a big dorm room all to myself -- which is much nicer in theory than in practice. There were some lonely moments.

Fortunately, 1995 was near the dawn of the e-mail era, and I was up at sunrise. To keep in touch with my friends, who had scattered to the wind after graduation, I sent out a daily e-mail quotation to a small, select group of buddies. It started out with a mailing list of eight people, and somehow it eventually ballooned to a list of nearly 40 individuals, including college friends, people I barely knew in high school and friends-of-friends that I never met at all. I called it my "Daily Thought," which was sort of a play on words, though there was some truth in it; I probably I put a lot more effort into this daily e-mail than I did into Biology class.

It was great for a year, but then came the summer (with no access to e-mail). It turned out to be a pretty crappy summer and I trudged back to college in August with a broken and bitter heart. In my first e-mail resurrecting the Daily Thought, I unleashed a visceral, unattractive rebuke to the aforementioned heartbreaker. It was too harsh to be funny and too angry to be honest, and it inspired at least a dozen people to beg themselves off the list. The Daily Thought died that day, and the tether linking me to my high school friends shriveled up to nothing.

In many ways, this Enchanted Pants project is v2.0 of my Daily Thought and I thank you all for tuning in. (Although who knows how many of you have since tuned out.) For you remaining readers, here is the only three-time Daily Thought, an attributionless poem I found in a book somewhere.

"Man strives for honor, glory, fame
That all the world should know his name
Amasses wealth by brain and hand
Becomes a power in the land
But as he nears the end of life
And looks back o’er the years of strife
He finds that happiness depends
On none of these, but love of friends."

It's cheesy, but then again, so am I.
Sending my best,
Enchanted Pants