Round Up...

Ya'll knew I was going to post on it sooner or later, right? For those of you not in the DC,MD,VA circuit, a round up site for black schools has hit the internet. And, while the concept is not new, (because we used a similar site to locate classmates for our high school class reunion) this is more of a "myspace" approach to reuniting. I heard about it first through my Howard peoples, my close homeboy, and then a good friend. I figured if Howard had one, then certainly the "real" HU did also - smile, I couldn't resist - so i randomly checked for a Hampton site. And, there it was, www.pirateroundup.com.

So then I was faced with the interesting question. Do I want to be found? Do I want to reconnect, reunite, rekindle old relationships? At first, the answer was a hesitant no. While I knew alot of people while I was there, what was the chances they would remember me? If I started a page, would I become a "Roundup" dud, that is have my worse fears confirmed when NOONE bothered to become my friend? Or, what if I wasn't important enough to anyone to be in their "memory" chain? What if I requested to be their friend and their response was 'who the hell are you.' (Yes, unfortunately, this is really how I think. But, since so many of you have been reading, you already know this...)

So, instead of posting a page, i went through other pages. The past temp boyfriend(s) that I never admitted to...hmmm. LOL. The past psuedo relationship that never came to fruition....hm mm(again). The girl i always thought would be the most successful. the friend I thought I would never be able to find. the homegirl who i socialized with sometimes, but would run from other times. (Some times, I used to be funny acting like that - chalk it up to low self esteem). They all had pages. They all had innumerable amount of friends.

Then, i went to the pages of those exfriends - you know, the ones that were SOOOOO cool, before they became....fill in the blank here (Greek, Cheerleader, Socialite, FratHo, Lush, etc...). And I came across a few faces of people who I had a relationship with but inexplicable lost it, and always wondered...what if, or, more often than not, what was I thinkin?

So, I swallowed my incessant self doubt and posted a page. Then, as is always the case, I got wrapped up in the fun of creating "My space" and my phobias evaporated as I searched for that perfect KRS1 song to play on my site. So ridiculous, I know. And I began to submerge myself into the socializing of what is now Hampton cyberspace.

I think the difficulty for me was the reality that, just like that, I was back in that uncertain, late teen space where socializing and outside opinions meant so much, or at least I thought they did. And just the idea of having to cross that social bridge almost felt overwhelming. Here it is, more than ten years later, and somehow i reverted to a space i thought I had long overcome and cast away.

I guess some part of me never actually fit at Hampton. It was a different world, and I resisted it for a long time. But I learned to love it and appreciate it. Those years were difficult ones for me, trying to escape the things i didn't like about my past, wanting to believe i was doomed to be a failure, as i was often told, and trying to form who i wanted to be. Believing in a dream of the future me, but having no evidence, no proof, that I could ever be anymore than I was. WHile my friends nad fellow Hamptonites worried about the next cabaret, i wondered why my mother wouldnt had just cussed me out, how would i survive the engineering department, where would i go after hampton, etc...The personal journey was very necessary, but taxing, painful, exhausting. And Hampton was the background to that change - so i often escaped it, running to Norfolk State to be with my then boyfriend now husband. So , where does that leave me and how do i really fit into the scene of Hampton alumni?....I guess that's the real question that Pirate Roundup has begun to answer....