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Facebook memories, both mine and my friends', smacking me in the face this morning reminding us that it has been THIRTY YEARS TODAY since The X-Files debuted on network television. A show that Julie and Elaina had to persuade me to watch because I was definitely a child of shiny optimistic future sci-fi shows at that point (*cough* Star Trek: TNG), unsure about the creepier-looking horror-type elements in the preview.

The three of us sitting in the common room, chowing down on Ben and Jerry's, feeling the tension rise as Mulder checked Scully's back for unexplainable puncture wounds, then relax as they proved to be mosquito bites. Relief that Mr. Stockdale didn't walk into the common room until after that scene, because otherwise he probably would've made us turn it off, seeing a woman onscreen in mostly just her underwear with zero context. (Little would any of us know how paltry an amount of emotional/romantic/sexual payoff the show would provide us over its run - at the very least until we were all well over the age of majority! - certainly nothing Mr. Stockdale had to worry about impressionable teenagers consuming, ahahaha!) Me, afterwards, still unsure of the scarier bits but intrigued by the characters, now with a new Friday night routine: grocery shopping, then running from the bus to claim the common room for our show.

That a TV show would lead to me meeting so many people through what we were then referring to in vaguely-near-futuristic terms such as "the world wide web," still in the realm of fantasy for all but the earliest of adopters - beyond my ability to conceive at that point. But I would go off to college a few years down the road. Lose track of XF for the fall of my freshman year in the excitement of making new friends, being in my first romantic relationship ever. My roommate Shay would bring a TV back from the winter holiday break, and we would be flipping through the channels with Ingrid one night, sitting on Shay's bed, and discover that Friday had become Sunday. That Mulder and Scully were still out there, that the monster of the week ate cancer, and was going after Scully at the climax of the episode, and BOOM I was sucked back in.

Later that night, I would go on Yahoo! Search, and my search queries would lead me to a weekly post-episode chat and mailing list where people were discussing not only the plot twists, but the character relationships. The above-mentioned romantic relationship I was in would fall apart the same week (blessing barely in disguise); the people I met through that chat became friends for life, providing perspectives of life outside the college bubble when it all became too much for me.

I would go to my first in-person meetup with them later that summer in Vancouver, run around X-Files filming sites, squealing in delight; it felt like summer camp for XF fans. Make it an annual gathering for a few years, whether in Vancouver again or DC or NYC (the weekend I graduated!) or Vegas. Watch friends fall in love because of this chat channel, even from across countries and oceans, move to be with each other. Their experiences eventually giving me the chutzpah to start dating somebody I'd basically met online myself (well, set up by a friend, "secretly but blatantly,"), years before most of my in-person friends did, and every time I would go visit him in DC and we'd take the Metro somewhere, I'd laugh, thinking of how me and my XF friends had belted out David Duchovny, Why Won't You Love Me? on the Orange Line from Metro Center all the way out to Ballston, and how I had met all of them partly because of this technology that barely existed when I was growing up, but also the motivation of connecting over what we loved.

Layers of nostalgia building on each other across a lifetime, connecting everything and everyone and making me smile, even if the results of ever trying to explain end up with "... that was not remotely what I was expecting to hear, and I love that a weirdo like you is in my life." That my Sunday night routine became running back to my dorm room with ladysisyphus after rehearsal so that we could watch XF together on the little 12" TV I'd hauled back to my dorm room on the bus from the mall, but I'd always hop onto chat afterwards. That eventually chat became LiveJournal, then Facebook, but the friendship ties remained.

And now, even after all these years, still keeping up with each others' lives. Still having them over for dinner on our front porch. Still planning to get together the next time we're in each others' cities. (Still convinced we should've taken over XF and detangled everyone from the ridiculous, no-payoff "mytharc," even though that longer, not-limited-to-one-episode storytelling arc would become more prevalent over the following decades, and be done much, much better with other series.)

Still out there.

I didn't think I was going to San Francisco last week after all because of moving and the hurricane. But MAGIC HAPPENED, and thanks to the talents and persistence of the hyounpark travel agency and our Bluepasses, my flight got booked Tuesday night, and 24 hours later I was ON A PLANE.

First stop: Udupi Palace for pineapple uttapam with high school friend Karen, my brother, and his college friend Ian.



We're talking cafeteria-size trays here. Enough that we all walked out with leftovers, and then a homeless guy asked us for spare change; we asked him if he was hungry, and he walked away with at least a day's worth of food for himself.

( Thursday, Bay Area: wherein I eat like a hobbit; what the ocean tastes like; a wide-eyed baby who likes watermelon sorbet. Korean barbecue. Sweets up the wazoo. )

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( Friday, San Francisco: the foodpocalypse continues. )

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( Repacked Saturday, and then skipped down to DC Sunday morning. Rockets, cupcakes, the meaty meat platter, the best burger Hyoun has ever had, and Vermont sugar on snow. )

So yeah, that's how I spent four days in a row in airports. ;) Thanks, Bluepass! Now to figure out where we're going this weekend ... we'd originally thought Pittsburgh, but that may get pushed back to next weekend, and we may do Chicago instead. We'll see!