Internet Stalking

It's a Friday night, and I have no desire to do anything productive. For a while, I tried to take a nap. When I got a phone call, I figured that was my hint that the nap should be over (but it didn't even start!).

So, I started surfing the web. Now, web surfing is not something I do very often. I usually just have a set number of sites that I visit. Over the course of an evening or even a weekend, I can get rather bored with the internet, because none of the sites that I look at have updated at all.

Tonight, I'm not sure what got into me, but I decided that I would like to try to find some people from my past. There are some folks who I met a long time ago, that I think about the every once-in-a-great-while. I wonder who they are and what they've become.

There were some folks that I met while I was a student in the Community College who were really fun and interesting people. Back in 1997, I was invited to participate in an honors institute in Germany. About 45 people from around the US were invited to participate, so we became a pretty tight-knit group. We kept in touch for a while, but the bonds of friendship eventually frayed from the scraping of time (just flexing my literary muscle).

There are a few folks who I still keep in touch with from my Germany days. In fact, my Other Half was one of the Germany participants. Apparently, he kept in touch so well that we now live together!

Anyway, I suddenly got curious about a couple of other folks. So I did what any self-respecting stalker would do: I typed a name into Google. This resulted in a bunch of false leads. So eventually I tried a different name. This was was more fruitful in the short term. It turns out that this guy is running a blog and a podcast about life in Germany. Score one!

I returned to the first guy...the guy with the pretty common name (apparently, a common name among doctors!). I decided that I could try to narrow the search by typing his home town in (or at least the town that was listed on the address I had from 1997). Then I struck gold! It turns out he is a chiropractor in Florida.

So what do I do with my new information? I have not contacted either of these guys. I'm not quite sure what I would say. "Hi. Remember me? It's Ross. Yup, I stalked you and found you on line. What's up? I mean, beside the information I found out about you from Google."

I don't want to freak them out by contacting them. I also don't want to make any awkward non-conversation between folks who really don't have much in common. I'm not sure what to do at this point. Any advice is appreciated.