Back in March, I received a Facebook friend invitation from someone I used to know in high school (in the San Fernando Valley, CA). We weren’t exactly friends back then but were acquaintances and had some mutual friends, so I accepted.

Her friend request, though, didn’t come with any kind of message or “Hey, how’s it going!” or “Can’t believe how long it’s been!” comment.

So I took the novel approach of messaging her to see how she was doing. I wanted to keep it short since catching up with people on the last decade-and-a-half of your life is as much fun as watching cooking shows.

I noticed that her “network” was in Raleigh, so I wrote the following:

“So give me your 14-year recap. What are you up to? What took you to Raleigh?”

She responded with this:

“First of all, I was born in Raleigh…I came to LA when I was 13 years old, remember?

Everything is good…I am still in LA. Having fun…working, going out, dating, etc. How are you? DC, huh? How long have you been there?

Take care.”

There was so much wrong with this message I couldn’t even begin to deconstruct it in my head. “First of all”? Where was the “second of all”? We were barely friends in high school, how could I be expected to remember she was from North Carolina let alone her family’s continental migration habits?

I e-mailed Blue who, of course, also knew this girl. I copy-and-pasted our exchange. Not exactly the online social networking expert, Blue wrote back:

“This Facebook stuff is weird. How the f–k were you supposed to remember how old she was when she moved to LA or that she was born in Raleigh. You cant even remember that you didn’t get a hit in you first at bat at Dodger camp one month ago.”

Thanks, Blue.

Catching up with friends from high school is a superfluous act of nostalgic regression. You remember certain people for certain reasons (like who you took to prom) but have little to no interest in revisiting these memories (like your prom date getting picked up by her parents at 11pm). If these high school friends were so important to you, you would have stayed in contact with them in the first place.

But using Facebook, say, as opposed to the obnoxiously ubiquitous Classmates.com, is different. You can see how your high school “friends” have aged, what they’re doing, where they’re living, and who they’re hooking up with (if at all). You see people who once fretted about carrying enough AP classes instead holding babies. Or that popular asshole who you hated now “out and proud” and actually liking assholes.

And it makes it easier to skip high school reunions altogether, like an AP reporter wrote about yesterday.

The thing is, I didn’t even want to attend my 10-year high school reunion (back in 2003) even before the advent of Facebook. I just had no desire to see anyone face-to-face again and relive a time that had long passed me by. I’d rather look at them online, from afar, with the safety of an Internet connection acting as a social buffer.

In the past few weeks, I have “friended” a few other high school classmates and even joined my high school group.

Blue, however, isn’t sold:

“I don’t like this Facebook stuff. You two reconnect but have nothing to say to each other. Why even start it?”

I wrote the classmate who “friended” me two days later, asking her how she expected me to remember such information but asking who she’s still in contact with from high school.

That was two months ago. I haven’t heard back yet.

PHOTO CREDIT

When I was in junior high, the predecessor to today’s middle school, there were three ways you could be cool.

The first way was to be vaguely connected to the TV industry. We had one girl named Carrie whose sister played Heather in the show “Mr. Belvedere”. Another dude named Mason starred in some toy commercial, which for some reason automatically made him popular.

The second way was to wear the right shoes. I once was teased by my very own friends because I was wearing non-brand name sneakers with Velcro across the top that my dad perpetually bought me for $10 from Target. I told my dad how I needed $100 Nike sneakers because the Target shoes weren’t cool and that I was being ridiculed by my friends, to which he responded:

“If they make fun of you because of your shoes then they’re not really your friends.”

Makes perfect sense when you’re an adult. But when you’re 12-years-old and trying to hide your boners behind your schoolbooks every time a girl walked by, these shoes were the difference between being popular and being that guy who wore $10 shoes from Target.

The third way to be cool, from what I could tell since I wasn’t, was to be able to make signs with your hands. By that age, a bunch of upper-middle-class white kids running around flashing the “BLOOD” sign was totally rad and copied by everyone.

I could barely contort my fingers to spell – let alone the ubiquitous gang sign, though I did learn how later on in high school. To this day, it takes me a few seconds to get it right as I struggle to fold my fingers and thumbs into the right letters.

Declaring to who or what someone belongs through hand gestures continues to be a pretty common practice, even outside of suburban Los Angeles. But unless you’re trying to stake your claim to gang territory, it’s probably best not to do so once you’re old enough to vote.

I recently came across a friend’s photo on Facebook that showed him and his pals flashing a sign I had never seen before or even knew existed. This is the “301″ sign, meant to affirm one’s devotion to that area code which denotes part of Maryland, particularly Montgomery and Prince George’s counties.

The sign is formed by curling your forefinger down and tucking it into the fold of your skin between that finger and your thumb. This leaves your middle, ring, and pinky fingers showing (3), the forefinger tucked into a circle (0), and your thumb idly sticking out (1).

Cool? I don’t know. I’m too old to decide if these things are cool or not. I pretty much rely on other people to tell me whether something is cool or reviled. Though I hear this Soulja Boy dance is going to be huge.

But the problem with this 301 sign is that many people in the photo, which I won’t show out of deference to my friend and his buddies’ privacy, were doing it wrong. Out of 13 people in the picture, only four flashed 301 correctly.

Many had it backwards (like the guy in this photo, who apparently lives in the non-existent 103 area code), which would make sense if they were Hebrew. Others showed the sign sideways, which made it look like they were flashing the letter “B” in ASL.

As a Takoma Park resident since 2006 (though I lived for 7 years in the 202), I am proud of the 301. It’s way better than being from, say, 703.

Still, throwing signs, whether you’re a tiny kid from the San Fernando Valley or a University of Maryland alum with a real job, should probably not be at the top of your “party tricks” list (unless you’re trying to entertain a fussy kid by casting animal shadows against the wall).

Like I said, I’m no judge on what’s cool anymore. But I will always be a judge when it comes to doing things the proper way.

Especially if I catch you wearing $10 Velcro shoes from Target.

In his incredible book Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs, Chuck Klosterman writes about how reading the obituaries made him realize that each of us, in the end and even during our lifetime, is defined by one thing.

J.D. Salinger wrote Catcher in the Rye; for all practical purposes, that’s it. He may as well have done nothing else, ever.”

For some of us, this phenomenon is not exactly like getting a raw deal. Neil Armstrong will always be known as “the first man to walk on the moon”. Lily Allen will always be “that adorable chick who got famous for her songs on MySpace”. Even Klosterman himself will go down as “that pop culture writer dude”.

But no matter what you accomplish with your life and no matter how long and varied you live it, you are, ultimately, reduced to one sentence.

Think about your friends and how you would describe them to a stranger. Think about what the lead would be in their respective obituaries. You can probably sum up their legacies using about 10 words.

Look at this online obituary I found yesterday from the Washington Post. This University of Maryland professor, who lived for nearly a century and I’m sure was a very nice person, left this world known as a Pompeian historian. Is that a bad thing? Probably not. I’m sure there are many advantages to knowing everything there is to know about the ruined and somewhat relevant city of Pompeii. But Wilhelmina’s life was reduced to this one thing.

The most incredible example of this type of reductionism is the story of Claudia Wells. Wells owns the boutique Armani Wells in Studio City, CA. She has a flair for men’s fashion and her Web site says she is “known for dressing the most stylish men in Los Angeles.”

But that is not how she is known. You most likely know Wells as that chick who played Jennifer Parker, Michael J. Fox’s girlfriend in the movie I have seen more than any other, Back to the Future. And 23 years after the movie was released, she is still telling people about that role.

Her Photo Gallery has a link to Back to the Future Photos. Her About Us page describes her stint in the movie as “memorable”. A photo of her shows her sitting in a freakin’ DeLorean! This woman, now 41 and still looking really good, reduced herself to a role that gave her just a few minutes of screen time and which she didn’t even reprise in the sequels.

Is this sad? Hardly. It is human nature, after all, to simplify the world around us, even at the cost of substance. It is an unfortunate fact of life — but a fact nevertheless.

Think of your own life. In your mind, you can probably wax poetically about your life accomplishments, filling the pages of your autobiography with interesting tales, events, and memories that make you a unique snowflake. That cancer scare that made you realize how strong you were. Moving to a new city and proving to yourself you could do it. Growing a mustache and raising thousands of dollars for charity.

But when people ask your friends about you, or when they have time to think about you, you will be condensed to a five-second blurb. This probably, in the end, doesn’t really diminish any of us, not really. But when there is so much of our lives left to trim, doesn’t it at least feel that way?

Little known trivia: the woman who plays Jan in “The Office” (Melora Hardin) was briefly cast as Jennifer but was fired because she was taller than Michael J. Fox.

Though my Los Angeles Dodgers of Los Angeles were mathematically eliminated earlier this week, the 2007 baseball season will officially put an end to our misery on Sunday when the Blue Crew finish out their 162nd game of the year against the San Francisco Giants.

Though this season started out full of hope, with many fans and analysts picking a Dodgers-Angels World Series, only eight teams not named after Brooklyn’s now-disintegrated trolley system will continue into the playoffs. LA, currently 80-78, will go home and regroup for next year.

I’m not going to analyze the Dodgers’ season over what went wrong. I’m just going to think about a time when my favorite baseball team WAS magical.

It was 1988, a season that should not — could not — have happened. The Dodgers won 94 games in a year that started with a first-pitch homerun by Steve Sax and ended with Orel Hershiser on the mound in Oakland. That was a year when the names Mickey Hatcher, Tim Belcher, and Mike Scioscia took on mythical meaning. When the number 59 became synonymous not just with Orel’s record scoreless streak but became as ingrained in my memory as 755, 56, and .366.

Game 1 of the World Series, of course, featured the greatest moment I have ever seen.

Down 4-3 in the 9th inning against a powerful A’s team, Kirk Gibson came up to bat with the tying run on base. He could barely walk. He could barely swing. I was at home watching in my bedroom, sitting on the edge of my bed as my mom yelled at me to take out the trash, staring at my 13-inch TV hoping against hope Gibby could draw a two-out walk against Dennis Eckersley, then the best reliever in the game.

My best friend Blue was actually at the game. I saw every Dodger fan, more than 54,000 in attendance, on their feet. Gibby worked the count full and then hit the most dramatic homerun in Dodgers history, belting it deep into right field as Vin Scully uttered the lines that, to this day and even as I write them, give me chills:

“In a year that has been so improbable, the IMPOSSIBLE has happened!”

Wait ’til next year.

He was shorter than I had expected. Still imposing, stocky and wide, the perfect build for a running back who amassed 11,236 yards in his NFL career.

His right hand, the one that didn’t fit into the infamous leather glove, was huge. Larger than any hand should be. I had introduced myself as the news editor for my school paper. He took my hand and shook it, looked me straight in the eye, and said “Nice to meet you.”

All I could think about was, “This is the hand that butchered two people.”

It was a quiet evening in my apartment. I was a 21-year-old senior, the news editor of my school newspaper, sitting on the couch watching “Beverly Hills, 90210″.

A loud knock on my apartment door disrupted my watching of Brandon, Dylan, and Brenda. I opened it to find my then-girlfriend British Liz who was supposed to be in a 4-hour evening class panting, trying to catch her breath.

“What are you doing here? What’s wrong?” I asked her.

“Oh Jay…Simp…son…is…on campus…you have…to go…interview him.”

“Who?”

“OJ fucking Simpson!!!”

“But 90210 is on,” I said.

Unable to convince her that Kelly, Steve, and Donna Martin Graduates! were more important, I grabbed my notebook and headed to campus. I got the back story on the way.

It seemed that one of our school’s criminology professors had served as one of OJ’s lesser-known defense lawyers in the sensational “Trial of the Century”. He had furtively invited OJ to speak at his class and had notified no one – not the press, not university officials – of his arrival.

British Liz, during a break from her class next door, had seen the commotion and peered into the classroom, only to find The Juice himself standing in front of what looked like 100 students. She had skipped the rest of her class and run to my apartment to tell me (this was before the ubiquitous age of cell phones).

I arrived and walked right into the classroom, confident that no one would stop me. They didn’t. I stood about 15 feet away from OJ for nearly two hours, listening to him lecture to these sycophantic students who had obviously been convinced he was innocent.

When he was done, and amid the roar of applause, I immediately walked up to him and introduced myself before the professor or anyone else could stop me.

He stuck out his meaty paw and we shook hands for 3 seconds. I told him I was a reporter for my school paper. He didn’t pull out a knife so I interviewed him. Students clamored around him, asking for an autograph. He signed blue books, old football cards, and notebooks. Someone even brought in a football for him to sign.

We talked for five minutes. I honestly don’t remember anything he said. I wish I did. I walked back home and typed up my story.

The next day, in our newsroom, reporters and editors asked me what it was like to meet OJ.

Someone inquired, “Did you ask him if he did it?”

“Yeah”, I answered sarcastically, “OJ Simpson confessed his guilt to some Orange County university paper reporter.”

I wish I still had that article.

For many Jews, our parents’ most powerful warning growing up was this:

“If you get a tattoo, you can’t be buried in a Jewish cemetery.”

This dire warning, which always sounded vaguely apocryphal yet was never dismissed outright, was as “factual” to Jewish children as the requirement to get good grades. Questioning our parents’ logic when it came to Jewish law was tantamount to praying for Jesus to save us.

Credit

A conversation I might have had with my mother could have gone like this:

“Don’t ever get a tattoo.”

“Why not?”

“Because you won’t be able to get buried in a Jewish cemetery.”

“So?”

“Aye, dios mio!“

But despite such near-desperate pleas from our parents to never permanently mar our skin, all three children, led by my younger-yet-more-rebellious-sister, eventually got tattoos.

I had always wanted a tattoo. I found them meaningful and aesthetically impressive as a child. And when I graduated from college, as a present to myself, I went to a tattoo shop on Ventura Blvd., picked out an arm-band I had liked, and got my flesh stabbed repeatedly by dozens of ink-filled needles for two hours.

I kept the tattoo a secret from my parents, showing only my friends and siblings.

One day, however, while relaxing on the couch at home, my arm sleeve was pulled up inadvertently and my mom spotted a dark stain gripping my bicep.

“Que es eso?“ she asked.

“Nada,” I replied, fixing my sleeve.

But she knew. She turned her head, made a stoic face, and didn’t talk to me the rest of the afternoon.

I eventually learned that though the adage that tattooed Jews can’t be buried in a Jewish cemetery was a highly perpetuated myth, it did violate the Torah –“ specifically, Leviticus 19:28:

Ye shall not make any cuttings in your flesh for the dead, nor print any marks upon you: I am the LORD.
Of course, Leviticus also proclaims I shouldn’t turn my daughter into a whore, go to a psychic, or shave my beard, so reading the Bible takes several grains of salt, so to speak.

Credit

I still find tattoos fascinating and have been considering a second one for years. They make women infinitely more attractive (look at my new favorite photographer Cindy Frey, photographed above) and the idea of regretting mine has never crossed my mind, even 9 years later.

One of the most common arguments I still hear from the anti-tattoo lobby was, “What are you going to do when you’re old and have a tattoo on your flabby arm?”

I tell them, “If I have a flabby arm when I’m old, a tattoo will be the least of my problems.”

Besides, I could have inked any of these disasters tattoos.

When I was a kid, my dad told me the only thing he wanted from me was to “not grow up”.

I didn’t listen. Neither, it seems, have “my campers”.

I spent my summers in college working long days at Camp Sharwood in Woodland Hills, California, singing songs, playing patty-cake, and doing arts and crafts with hundreds of kids. These kids, though, have since become adults. Real, live, full-fledged adults. Who are on Facebook.

My campers, who used to call me “Radar” (part of the fun was having the campers call us by our nicknames; I called myself Radar because I loved the show M*A*S*H), are on the popular social networking site and are forgetting that, to me, they’re supposed to stay sweet and innocent forever.

These “adults” are the same kids whose hands I once held when they were too scared to ride a rollercoaster; the same kids who I taught how to hit a softball; the same kids who I read bedtime stories to when I babysat them; and the same kids whose scraped knees I would bandage when they fell down.

Instead, I see pictures of them on Facebook going on beach trips, graduating from college, going skydiving, getting drunk, and hanging out with friends — all things my friends do.

But they’re just children, I thought as I accepted each of them as Facebook friends this week, how can they be kissing boys?

Here is one of my favorite campers, who thanked me for giving her the courage to ride the Matterhorn at Disneyland, wearing a bikini saying “We’re the shit lol” in one of her photos.

They’re only kids.

Here’s another camper who’s now taller than me who I used to entertain with impressions of Mike Myers’ SNL character of “Simon”.

They play with toys.

Here’s another who is now a 6′ 2″ man-giant and who describes his occupation as a “cop killa”. I used to take him to the “emergency room” whenever he overreacted about being hurt.

They wet their pants.

Seeing these kids — er, adults — again brought back memories: The boy who threw up on me while we watched the Batman show at Knott’s Berry Farm. The girl who showed me during a night of babysitting a video of her being born. The ADHD kid who ran away and who I had to haul back to camp over my shoulder. The time I temporarily “lost” a kid at Raging Waters. The “Final Shows” we put on to entertain the parents.

But my favorite memory is the story of a 6-year-old boy (I wish I remembered his name) who was so shy when he started at Camp Sharwood that he wouldn’t play with other kids, kept to himself, and stared at me without saying a word whenever I talked to him.

I encouraged him slowly without pushing him and after a week or so, he became much more social. After a few weeks I noticed he started combing his hair slick back like mine. At the end of the year, this boy’s mom came up to me and asked, “Are you Radar?”

When I told her I was, she hugged me and said, “You have no idea what an impact you have had on my son.” She went on to tell me how shy he once was but how happy he had become since meeting his “favorite camp counselor”. She added that every morning, she combed his hair but he wasn’t happy until it looked “just like Radar’s”.

To me, that kid will be six years old forever.

Below is a group picture of Camp Sharwood counselors. Can you find me? Click to enlarge.

I played Wii for the first time recently and found it pedantic and boring, if not physically taxing.

A friend gave me a bootlegged copy of Baseball 2007 for Playstation 2 and I felt disinterested at best.

Culito invited me over to play Xbox and I yawned.

I thought my recent lackluster response to video-gaming was a sure sign that I had matured and started acting my age. Then I sang “Milk, milk, lemonade, ‘round the corner fudge is made!” and realized I was wrong.

The real reason, I believe, is that I miss the video games I used to play. I’m not talking about the games we, as a generation, used to play — like Pac-Man, Super Mario Bros., or Q-Bert. I mean the games I loved. Here are five games I miss playing:

Cyberball, Atari.

Blue and I were addicted to this game. As teenage nerds with no girls to talk to, we would venture to the Fallbrook Mall arcade every weekend to play the futuristic football game featuring fallible robots. Sure, the science behind it made less sense than the flux capacitor, but you got to destroy robots who tried to gain yards.

Double Dribble, Nintendo.

Since even Super Mario and his brother Luigi could have beaten me at basketball (as long as they ate magical mushrooms), I had to turn to this game to feel like an NBA star. It eventually taught me how to shoot three-pointers from the corner, except in… well, you know… real basketball games.

NHL ’94, Sega.

I dominated this game. Whether I played as the Campbell Conference All-Stars or the weaker L.A. Kings or the awful Winnipeg Jets, I would beat all opponents. Even if I had a midterm I hadn’t studied for the next day and it was 2am, I always made time for this game. This was the version earlier than the one made famous in Swingers (“I can make Gretzky’s head bleed”).

Contra, Nintendo.

When people ask me where I developed my lifetime hatred of South American terrorists and alien life-forms hell-bent on human destruction, I cite this game. My friend Resnick and I used to record our games on my VCR and then watch them in order to analyze our skills and improve. Ballplayers call this behavior “watching film”. We called it “we have no girlfriends”.

Snafu, Intellivision.

This game and console are so old most people reading this weren’t even born when they went out of business. But I remember taking trips to Northern California to visit my uncle and aunt and playing this game for hours. It pretty much involved manipulating a snake-like figure that grew longer so it wouldn’t crash into itself. My sister and I fought over the controller every time we played but, luckily, I was bigger and would pound her if she took too long to play.

“Oh no, no. Too high, it’s too high.” — Cleveland Indians fan Ross Farmer tracking the flight path of a homerun, in Major League.

While watching my L.A. Dodgers pound the natty Nats 5-0 last night at RFK, I overheard two middle-aged men sitting behind me talking out of their collective ass.

Not literally, of course; but enough inane comments to nearly make me turn around and address them.

“Have you seen Fever Pitch?” one of them said. “That’s a great movie.”

Wince.

“He was safe by a mile,” after Ryan Church got caught stealing in the 2nd inning, even after television replays showed him out by a step.

Groan.

“I was rooting for Duke.”

Idiot.

There really should be three guarantees in life: death, taxes, and baseball fans saying stupid things. Attend any ball game and you’ll hear pseudo-managers argue obtusely about topics like the Yankees’ payroll, interleague play, and sabermetrics.

Or you’ll hear fans question a team’s strategy, the umpires’ calls, and baseball trivia — usually contrary to the facts.

Football may have its Monday-morning quarterback phenomenon, but baseball has more fan-based, second-guessing and ersatz expertise than any other sport. We like to think we know what we’re talking about; baseball and the nature of its provincial beginnings bring out that need probably more than any other sport.

P.S. Last night’s Dodgers win raised the ballclub’s all-time record to 9,389-8,542, a winning percentage of .524. Just in case you were wondering. Here are some reasons why some of us bleed Dodger Blue:

Photo credit: Cakeplow.com

When I was in junior high school, I had a bully. I called him My Bully because, like the ubiquitous My Buddy commercials of the 1980s, wherever I went, he went.

I had severe acne then and every day in P.E., My Bully reminded me that my pizza face was unacceptable. Also, he made himself quite clear that my ability to get better grades than he would not be tolerated.

As punishment for having hormone-charged sebaceous glands and a superior intellect, My Bully would push me to the ground and call me a FAG, which, for some ironic reason, stood for “Female Ass Grabber”. One day, I questioned his logic in front of the entire class and wondered if that made him a “Male Ass Grabber”.

This reverse psychoanalysis must have confused My Bully because I never did get an answer, only a violent shove. But it worked. He left me alone.

The problem with modern bullying is that kids rely too much on the instant gratification of hitting someone. Psychological warfare, though, can be a much more satisfying tactic if applied correctly.

My friend GoPats was a self-described bully when he was 11-years-old, but not in a physical way.

“I tended to dominate the conversation and get laughs at other people’s expense, kind of like I do now,” he told me.

I asked him if mental bullying was better than its physical counterpart.

“It takes more brains,” he responded. “Psychologically tormenting someone takes a little more thought. Walking by and punching someone is stupid.”

When my future kid gets picked on –- and he will — I’m not going to treat it like an ABC After School Special and tell him to talk it out with His Bully or that he’s just more scared than he is or any of that other Growing Pains bullshit..

Instead, I’ll help him design a fool-proof retaliation strike aimed at emotionally scarring the bully.

And if that doesn’t work, I’ll teach him how to trim bansai trees and enter him into the All-Valley Karate Tournament.

After all, not every bully has parents as awesome as this mom.

Photo credit: Frank Bellino/The Press-Enterprise

Two days in a row, Wonkette? I’m blushing.