I've always hated getting that random message or friend request from someone I've never heard of.  "How R u?" these things usually go.  Yeah right.  Delete.  And don't even get me started on the messages from people who obviously are fishing for a date.

Unsurprisingly, I had the same deep-sigh-groan-and-eye-roll reaction the first time Aaron sent me a message on Myspace.  The only thing stopping me from outright deleting his message ("Hey, how are you?  I see we went to the same high school.") was the fact that I still felt a twinge of nostalgic longing for my alma mater, and anyone associated with it.

So I entertained him.  And then we discovered our younger siblings were in the same graduating class at the same high school.  And then we discovered we both liked the same German metal band.  We messaged each other about the school's infamous Vice Principal, about teachers we loved, about teachers we loved to hate, and about how our school's glaring lack of athletic infrastructure.

Then we decided to meet at a local Mexican joint - and Aaron never showed up.  Then we tried again.

Our first dinner together was two hours of political science theory over tacos and Aaron's six glasses of water.  I remember there was something about a theoretical global government and its positive and negative implications. By the time we were (finally!) finished, our waitress looked like she wanted to kill us.

More than four years later, we're still discussing political science theory and laughing about how irritated that poor girl looked (in our defense, we left her a big tip).  We've watched (and joked about) our younger siblings march down the aisle together at their high school graduation, and posed for pictures at my parents' 25th wedding anniversary celebration.  We've lived through a tangle with a tractor trailer that resulted in our vehicle somersaulting in the air.  We've joked about naming our dog Spaceship.

And we've loved.

Myspace has been attributed to things both good and bad, and I'm still generally skeptical about it.  What I'm sure of though, is that without Aaron's first innocent message, I would have never given him a second thought.  As much as I hate to admit it, my curious impulse about a persistently-irritating cybertrend helped me connect with the best part of my life.

Thanks, Tom.