It's July, yet June gloom lingers in the San Gabriel Valley.  As I woke up this morning, subconsciously I pulled a gray shirt over my head.  I realized I am trying to sympathize with the clouds. Everyone, well most Californians, hate that the clouds remain in July as they fantasize about baking on famous beaches. However, today it reminds me of home in the Northwest.

I've been thinking of "home" a lot lately. Probably because my high school reunion is this weekend. The past few weeks I have truly embodied June gloom - a looming gray murkiness over the impending event. Stories from my current friends haunt me as they say their ten year was the worst due to everyone feeling the pressure to prove something or show-off. I don't know... I've never done this before.  So I'm trying to see through the gray, and make something of it, but it's hard.

Reunions are often awkward events perpetuated by either 1) academic tradition or 2) the one crazy aunt in the family who believes in fairies and forced family bonding (and yes, reunions are almost always planned by women). Such events may be fading as the notion of corralling physical bodies into a common room is being supplanted by the notion of corralling virtual people into a common network.

If you’re a Millennial (born since 1980), you will never know what it feels like to re-discover your past life during that first week of Facebook frenzy. I mean, when a fourteen year-old signs up for his first FB account, he’s flooded with the man-sized responsibility of choosing his network from among his already fixed social milieu; his friends haven’t changed much from yesterday’s “X-Men are the bomb!” status to today’s “Eating Flamin’ Hot Cheetos.” But when a Gen-Xer climbs into the saddle, he discovers that the Facebook trailhead is neither linear nor simple; rather, he finds all sorts of hidden trails leading to dark, shadowy places in his past—the high school stomachaches, the college apostates, the awkward career moves, the Ghosts of Churches Past.