Yesterday we went up to visit my mother's friend and mentor, Clare, at her rustic cabin home which looks over Bear Lake. Last July I took a photograph which now is on the welcome page of my web site up there. For "Christmas" dinner, we had fish. Although I am not a fan of fish and I did not have seconds, it did taste pretty good. We also drank lots of Australian wine; that probably helped.

(The Sublime)

In short, our range of topics was both wide and deep, and intellectually stimulating.

Then we drove back to Salt Lake City where we attended the annual Christmas Eve party for Don's (my step father) family. Gosh... where to begin. (The Ridiculous)

YOU MUST TRANSFORM TO THE UNSURPASSED GUY FOR YOUR WIFE

www.spamusement.com

Streetlight outside my New York home. I might never have seen it?

Those of you, who know me best, may not know that I am in fact from the planet Shashars, where I was the emperor of an empire that I ruled with an Iron Fist^TM. I am actually here on Earth as part of the Emperor Exchange Program. It's a service of the Galactic Dictators of the Universe, an elite club that only the biggest and most ruthless belong. It is very very invitation-only, if you know what I mean. Anyway, I'm here on Earth for vacation, to get away from it all, as it were, as an anonymous computer programmer working at The Company (real name removed to protect Corporate America).

I've been telling people this story in various forms for decades now. Not bad considering I am only approaching my third decade on this planet. In the first grade I had nearly my entire class convinced that they were also from Shashars. I even had a Queen to rule by my side (back then, I was the King instead of the Emperor - at some point I decided Empire sounded better than Kingdom).

Back then I was living in New Haven Connecticut, where my folks were employed as post docs at Yale. Later my dad would move to Chicago and my mum and I were off to Los Alamos. I was just now in my kitchen trying to think of what I wanted to snack on (finally decided on a tall glass of Chocolate Milk) and I wondered out of nowhere, how my life would have been different had I stayed in New Haven.

This is a bit embarrassing or maybe just funny... but I was theoretically engaged to a girl back then. I really wish I could remember what prompted me to do it, but I remember whispering into my Queen's ear "Do you want to marry me?" She answered in the affirmative. Now here is the embarrassing part: it has been so long and my memories of the first grade are so corrupted that I don't actually remember this girl's name. I don't know a girl I was sort of engaged to once.

If I had stayed in New Haven, might we have been friends growing up, like some of my friends in New Mexico? Would we now be old friends who occasionally sent e-mails back and forth at odd intervals? It is just so hard to say. It is hard to imagine how entirely different my life would be now, except just to know that it would have been completely different. When I think of life changing events, I usually think of two: one was moving to America with my parents (when we moved to New Haven in 1980), the other was when I put a free quotations database onto the Internet in 1995, which eventually led to a job offer at The Company and lead me to where I now live in New York State. Now that I think about it though, Moving to New Mexico from New Haven may not have been as dramatic as leaving one country to live in another one, but probably at least as causal to my effect.

On Friday, I was doing the laundry and they were playing the Beetles song "Hello, Goodbye." This made me laugh after the previous entry because this song reminds me of another old friend from my past. I won't go into the details, but in elementary school my best friend (at the time) "gUe" and I performed a skit to this song for the Aspen School talent show. It was by far the most creative performance that day, although I can't really take credit for that... the idea had been gUe's mom, who seemed to like the idea of putting us in the talent show.

I thought this was funny, because earlier in the day the song Ruiner had reminded me of another old friend (see previous entry), and I have been thinking about old friends a lot lately. Old friends in this context meaning anyone I was friends with before I moved to New York. I had been thinking also about how I don't keep in touch with anyone from the Los Alamos period in my life to talk to them about these thoughts, but then I remembered that I was going to Philly to see my friend Mike, who goes all the way back to my junior year at high school.

Just last year, he married a nice girl named Sarah who is also from Los Alamos; although I'd never met her until I went down to see Mike this weekend. So I had a bit of Home Town Overload, although it was surprisingly nice. I was pleased with myself because I recognized their wedding photographs as being taken at the White Rock Overlook, which incidentally was also featured in the film Silverado.

Mike was having a summer BBQ/party and I got to meet many of his friends and coworkers. A few of whom I had met the couple of times I have seen Mike since I moved here. He has very nice friends. They are all of the married/have young children age group... which I don't quite relate to yet. I only know one married couple who plan to have children, and that is still some time away. Anyway I was glad to go down there.

Next weekend I go to Maine!