I listened to Blondel this weekend for the first time in four or five years. It's a fairly silly musical based on the folktales about Blondel, Richard the Lionheart's fanatically loyal court minstrel who rescued him from captivity during the Crusades -- and in doing so really upset Prince John. Rumour has it that Tim Rice wrote the lyrics, but there's no proof. It certainly _sounds_ like Tim Rice, though. You can just see all the ideas he had during Blondel that eventually ended up in Chess.

Anyway. Shortly after I first met Steve he made me a copy of Blondel, and I listened to it constantly until I lost the tape. Then he made me another copy, and the cycle repeated until he moved back to Los Angeles and I lost my source. I asked him about it on the phone Friday night, so he had it in his car Saturday morning for us to listen to on the way to Orange County. After a little convincing he loaned me his copy, which is even now sitting in my car.

It's interesting how strongly music brings back emotion. I was just finding the Internet when I first listened to Blondel, and even now I associate it with sitting in my mother's office on her 286, playing initgame on IRC, overwhelmed by the strangeness of what I was doing. This was August of 1991, and I didn't have an account yet; I dialed up the University of Oklahoma annex ports until I found one that allowed telnet outside of the uoknor.edu domain, and then I connected to IRC by telnetting to bradenville.andrew.cmu.edu. I learned to send email to my IRC friends early on by telnetting to port 25 and talking to the SMTP daemons -- but I only used this to let them know I was on IRC, since they had no way to email me back.

Within a month I was mudding (having found a mudbot on IRC that gave me a list of all thirty-two muds in existance at the time), and once I found PernMUSH I quickly gained my okstate account and settled into mudding and email and Usenet in a big way. I kept trying to explain to people what I was doing, but nobody had any context on it. I wanted to buy my mother a book on the Internet, but at that point there _weren't_ any, really.

Now, of course, everything is familiar and predictable. The Internet is part of my job as well as being my playground. Almost everyone has an email address, and URLs show up on cereal boxes. Listening to Blondel, though, I remember what it was like to be doing something completely _new_, something very few people had ever heard of.

I miss that, sometimes. That's one of my reasons to go back to school. I want to make something new.

Speaking of 1991, I had lunch with Lydia today. I met her on PernMUSH in September of 1991 -- she was Amberyl, I was Deirdre. We hung out together a lot and talked about Pern, about college and computers, about the guy she was pining after, about the strange phenomena of VR and how much more intense it made everything. She was the one who explained to me how mudding compresses time, that a week on a mud is much more like a month of real interactions. She told me about how quickly one can make intimate friends, and how easily one can lose them when they vanish after graduation. I didn't believe her at the time, but it's a lecture I've given other people since.

Meeting her was interesting. Neither of us really muds anymore, so the things we had to talk about were the sort of things we talked about when we first got to know each other -- friends, family, job, relationships, decisions. Good things. It was a nice lunch, although my food wasn't very good and I was stressed from work.

Somehow I've been talked into arranging a see-Lydia dinner this Saturday. Why did I think August was going to be a restful month for me?

Tonight I can move back into my apartment. Jinian will be happy. She's wandering freely around Jim&Czr's now, but it's clear from her neurotic behavior while I was trying to sleep last night that she's ready to go home. So am I.