Defenestrating Thoughts from the Bivouac

One thing I really like about the status feature in Facebook is that it forces you to write in third person. In college, I had way too much fun writing AOL away messages in the style of bad Roman mythology with myself as the mythical hero. No really, I referred to myself as “our hero”. :-)

For example, from Dec 11, 1999:

Our hero, upon returning from the Nickerson hermitage, is shocked that the wise had absolutely nothing of value to say to him, though his kids were cute and funny. Our hero, after devouring his cold veggie sandwich, attempted to land himself a mole in the Beezer empire. However his contact was less than brilliant and let our hero muttering nonsense about the b-school and the lack of a good educational system in democratic nations. So our hero decides to quit procrastinating and attempt to use his special powers to find the secret bio decoder ring. Will our hero find the ring to slay the Elgin and Pakrasi tag team in Monday Morning Madness? Are will he choose to seek refuge in his EE Design Project? Stay tuned…

Unfortunately (or fortunately depending on your perspective), I only saved a handful of these writings. The rest are nothing more than lost bits and bytes in the vast universe of electrons.

And in case you’re wondering:

• Jackson Nickerson was the professor of Management 100 class that I was the TA for. I think I was referring to a dinner we had with him and his family.
• Cold veggie sandwiches were one of my staples in college (there wasn’t that much vegetarian dorm food).
• Beezer is my friend Bryce, who for literary purposes was one of my many antagonists.
• The reference to educational systems in democratic nations was likely some research I was doing for my column in the student paper. I wrote about geopolitics. I’m sure some of the old columns are floating around the web, which is unfortunate since I was a really bad writer back then. (Yes, even worse than now.)
• The decoder ring is a reference to an ongoing joke since high school, about how you need a decoder ring (like the ones in cereal boxes) to understand difficult topics.
• I don’t remember much about Monday Morning Madness, except that it was significant.
• Elgin and Pakrasi were the team of professors that taught our biology course (Bio 297, I think)
• EE Design Project is a reference to the really complicated EE projects we had. They were great for procrastinating on other school work.

Anyway, this got me thinking about cool plug-ins and apps for Facebook that I should build, but I’m sleepy so I’ll have to discuss them some other time.