Ryu2.mind

From: majordomo@lists.stanford.edu <majordomo@lists.stanford.edu>
Reply-To: majordomo@lists.stanford.edu
To: mwang@cs.stanford.edu
Date: May 12, 2005 10:47 PM
Subject: Majordomo results:

>>>> unsubscribe fics-chat

Succeeded.

For those of you who don't know, it was my college fellowship's famous -- most would say infamous -- unofficial email list where people would post anything and everything: requests for books, rides and miscellaneous favors, long-winded discussions shallow and deep, and of course -- the 'who's up?' messages that brought color and distraction to many an all-nighter. The messages and threads were inane for the most part, but sometimes -- just sometimes -- there'd be diamonds in the electronic rough.

It was not unusual to see dozens of messages generated over the course of one night, and I remember that one night, there were 500 emails, the result of a particularly wide-ranging discussion involving pretty much all of FiCS and then some. (It caused more than a few people to have problems with their disk quota...)

Even after I graduated, I stayed on, as a 'lurker'... I think I persisted on there longer than almost any FiCS alum from my time at Stanford, longer than Paul Kisoo Lee, list founder. Longer than greats like davehong, dchai, henryhsu, etc. Before I signed off, I did a 'who' command to query the members one last time -- only Irving and Phil from my class of ~20 FiCSters are still there to witness the antics of the young 'uns, and they're both still serving in the fellowship in some capacity.

Partially, it was out of laziness, but also in a way I unconciously chose to stay on there even long after I graduated, because it was, in a way, a link to the past. I think there were two main reasons: First, living and working in the Bay Area after Stanford, I never really thought of graduation as a clean delination between life stages, but rather a fuzzy, gradual boundary, considering all your underclassmen friends and the campus were just a few minute's drive away.

Second, because my classmates and I were also the first 'freshman' class in our fellowship, we felt a very special affinity for FiCS, being in many ways its initial core... serving as small group leaders, officers, etc. and building it up to what it is now, so in a way, it was fun to see our 'baby' grow through reading the emails.

Even fast-forwarding several years to my first days here in Shanghai when the people I knew in this city could be counted on 1 hand, it'd be reassuring in some inexplicable way to wake up and see dozens of "who's up" messages in my inbox (thank goodness for Gmail's auto-threading!)... an assurance that, yes, there was something still familiar from home that (however irrelevant those emails were to my life) was at least predictable in its routine.

But now, I now know effectively 0% of the current people in FiCS, and I've realized that it's time to move on... to be focusing on working at a new job, in a new life, in a new country, being part of a new community, in a new church, making new friends. There's email, IM and blogs to keep in touch and share with my personal friends from those days, so I'm not severing any real connection; I also know the fellowship that our class pretty much started is in good hands.

So, I admit, I wasn't really thinking of it as such when I finally issued the command to leave after 9-odd years; rather, it was mainly a step to save me time in the morning going through my inbox, but now I realize... it's also a little milestone for me in my transition thus far.

Farewell, fics-chat, and thanks for the memories. You'll be missed. =)