Three and a half years ago, I woke up one morning and said to myself, "Boy it would be nice to see all of my old classmates from the class of '83 at St. Stanislaus School and the class of '87 at Stuyvesant High School." I just sat there and thought about how in the world could I possibly accomplish this, considering that I had lost touch with my 20 living classmates from St. Stan's.(There were 21 but sadly, my buddy Jimmy Duval passed away in '93 from cancer) and about 770 classmates at Stuy. I had not joined any social networking sites or the Stuy Alumni Association at this point and figured that it would be impossible to gather these people together.
What started the ball rolling was the suggestion by a co-worker at the time, to check out My Space. She was a member and thought that I could possibly track some of these people down. I soon found a St.Stan's classmate named Dave who was on there and I mentioned to him about my intentions. he said, "Don't worry, these social networking sites will take off and you'll find a lot of people". I also found a few Stuy classmates, but no one that I was really dying to be in touch with. I soon stumbled upon a Yahoo board for the Stuy class of '87 and found some very interesting old classmates that I was happy to find. They were about to have their 20th reunion and considering that I had not done too much with my career or personal life, I didn't think that an underachiever like me would be someone that my classmates would want to see and I skipped going to it. I did find the comments by my classmates to be quite interesting. After a week or two, I got my courage up and posted a hello to everyone and explained my reasoning for not going to the reunion. I was pleasantly surprised by the response of several people that I was being silly and that I was part of them, no matter where I was in my life and that I should get involved in getting together with them. After that, I decided to attend a holiday season get-together of some Stuy classmates. I had a wonderful time and had the chance to chat with some people that I knew well and some that I never really knew at Stuy.
At that point, I joined Facebook and was shocked at how many friends I soon found on there. It was wild to me, how quickly my friend count grew into the hundreds. I noticed how easy it was to set up events and spent all of 2008 trying to find as many classmates as I could. I friended 7 of my St. Stan's classmates and maybe another 25 from other classes there. I also friended about 75 classmates from Stuy. I noticed that no one seemed to be interested in setting up any get-togethers and I decided that maybe I'm the person to do it. I began setting up Facebook parties. I was excited about the opportunities to finally see some of my old friends in person. If I may say so myself, I think I've done a good job of it. I do think that a lot of people feel that it has had it's run and I do agree. That's why I will start having them less often. I will have one St. Stan's party in 2011 and now that I'm a member of the Stuy Alumni events committee, I will just help setup whatever events they decide on as a group. I will organize the 25th Stuy '87 reunion in 2012. After that, we'll see
I do have to admit that there's one ulterior motive for all of this networking. I am still single at 41 and I was hoping to maybe find an old female classmate that I might get to know and who knows....... but, it seems that I've scared off a few of them and I still fear that the parade has passed me by. Hopefully, I'm wrong, but overall, I'm very happy to have found so many of you and hope to find some more.
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