digitaldiscipline ◾ ◾ Apparently, my cryptic remark was cryptic.

Yesterday, I mentioned in passing, "In a very real sense, I'm who I am today because, nearly two decades ago, I was mistaken for someone else."

There has been some curiosity in the wake of this comment. The story is probably less interesting than folks are hoping, but here it is:

My freshman year of college, I was hanging out in my dorm's lounge - it was filled with some foam-lego chairs, a TV on a wheeled stand, and had a pool table, which I was dicking around with. I'm leaning over to take a shot when this dude comes around the corner and souts, "Yarbles! Big fucking yarbles!"

"Pigs sucking marbles?" I inquired.

"Twig plucking garbles!" he replied (at this point, I'm paraphrasing, since I have no goddamned idea what the rest of the exchange degenerated into, just that it was a lot of rhymed riffing on his initial ejaculation).

This guy, a few weeks later, showed me a huge, really, fantasically, huge, no, even huger than that, list of email lists, printed on a six-inch thick sheaf of greenbar paper, to which students at our august institution could subscribe, using our university email accounts. A couple of them caught my eye, so I subscribed. One of them had a fair bit of traffic, and I made several friends, some of whom I'm still in sporadic touch with today.

The guy who came up with "Rafe" as a nickname was on there. I developed (or grew into) the person y'all know in no small part by navigating and investigating that space.

I just did a quick Facebook search for the guy who walked into the dorm lounge, inexplicably shouting about yarbles. There are a couple hundred hits, none of whom immediately jumped out as the guy (hell, I know I look plenty different, and I'm not even one of the folks whose profile has a picture of a cartoon, or their kid, or something equally unhelpful).

But, that day, he was actually looking for a guy named Dan. Things would probably be very different for me today if he'd just said that, instead.