Lucy Knisley, a cartoonist among other responsibilities, has a comic in praise of comforts, which isn't quite in opposition to my last post, but is a bit. The comic is rather small in the space available on my blog, so just click on the image and you will go to her page.

Today is my birthday.  On the actual date of my birth Kyle Eastwood, American jazz musician & son of Clint Eastwood was born.  I share a birthday with:

• Malcolm X
• Kevin Garnett
• Ho Chi Minh
• Mustafa Kamal Atatürk
• Mohammed Mosaddeq
• Grace Jones
• Nora Ephron
• André the Giant
• Joey Ramone
• James Gosling
• Pete Townshend
• Peter Mayhew
• Nicole Brown Simpson
• Pol Pot

Today is a weird day.

I meant to write up my 25 things about me, but other than writing down a few things in an unpublished blog post, didn't complete before the meme passed me by.  Still I do have a few peculiar-funny stories from my past that I should write down to amuse kids and friends (Mel has heard them all).  That will be another post.

However, the newest meme of navel gazing is to google "<your first name> needs" and write down what pops up.  So here is my list as of midnight, EST, 2/24/2009:

1. Jamie needs a kid (two is enough for me)
2. Jamie needs to maybe stop copying her (will have to think on that…)
3. Jamie needs Mental Health! (ok, right on the money with that one 😉
4. Jamie needs long hair? (never much liked long hair on my own head)
5. Jamie needs our support! (oh, yes please do)
6. Jamie needs a housewife like me (well have a wife, but cleaning tends to be my job)
7. Jamie needs a Tanner Family Hug (hmmm… well I already get quite a lot of hugs from my family, but the more the better)
8. Jamie needs a Badd Chick (no comment)
9. Jamie needs to loosen his choke collar (yeah, never got into those things, too straight-laced I guess)
10. Jamie needs Kelly's backing (okey dokey)
11. Jamie needs a haircut (wait, i thought I needed long hair)
12. Jamie needs to go to sleep

Actually, that last one I added myself.  Good night.

I probably put to much time into reading the status messages, notes or what not that friends post on Facebook, Twitter, or their blogs (RSS feeds are your friends). 

Part of my motivation is that several of my friends from bygones past died before I got back in touch.  Indeed, in one case, I googled a friend to find that her only reference was her obituary from a few months before.  While I know that it is just life, using these tools helps me, as Glen Daniels pointed out, to keep a finger in the lives of my friends whether we met 20 years ago or 2 months ago.

In someways I think I know more about some friends now than I did years ago.  It is weird, fun and somewhat reassuring all in one

When I was in high school I hung out at MIT a great deal.  It started at the MIT Educational Studies Program, and continued on until I went off to UMass Amherst for college.  It was there that I met some good friends, some of whom I worked with at FTP Software among other places.

It was there that I met Phil Servita, Larissa King, Mark Mason and others and embarked on what is the strangest telephone experience I have ever experienced until today.  For you see on that day over 20 years ago, we decided to pull a prank on Adam Mackler, IIRC.

We (by which I mean me, Phil and I think Larissa, Mark, and maybe one or two others) knew that Adam would be home alone that moment with his family away.  He would be asleep comfortably in his bed in the morning and we knew how to get into his house.  We stole into his house and cooked him green eggs and ham.  Then we tip toed up to his room, announced our presence, gave him the green eggs and ham and proceeded to go all Thing One and Thing Two on him and his house (though we didn't actually break anything.)

He chased us and finally got tired of it and went to his room and started to eat the green eggs and ham.  In his room we started to yell: phone, phone, phone, …  We had arranged with another friend for him to call Adam's house at just that time and ask something like "Is Joe there?" and hang up.  As we yelled phone, …, Adam picked up the phone before it rang, but just after it established the connection between the two phones and was greeted by "Is Joe there?" to which he screamed in surprise and threw the phone away.  And so I encountered my first case of telephone serendipity.

Thankfully, I am lucky enough to actually have two such experiences for today, as I sat in my car with my three year-old asleep in her car seat, and having just finished listening to NPR talk about John Maynard Keynes, I called Melanie.  I was greeted by the sound of someone dialing into the phone.  For at the exact moment that I called, she had pressed the Talk button on her phone and started dialing. 

Telephone serendipity can strike twice.