From: JSA Lowe <jsalowe at earthlink.net>
Date: Jul 11, 2006 12:18 PM
Subject: confessio
To: johnny at charm.net

Dear J-List:

Please allow me to introduce myself: Jennifer Lowe, SF '92
(who bailed in media res of her first year and went on to study
Elsewhere, albeit with a bad conscience that has persisted
despite a wide variety and number of degrees since then).
Here lies one whose name is writ in, um, margarine, having
achieved an inadvertent notoriety among your number by
being the original troublemaker who stumbled across the
accidentally-archived-with-Google JOHNNY Digest 1196,
mysteriously contained within SAGE Digest 553, courtesy
of some inexplicable Stanford listserv-software weirdness.

But I can explain everything....

1. I work from home as a freelance writer but I couldn't write
yesterday because I was recovering from the stomach flu.

2. Mr. Breslin and I (both divorced, which may surprise no
one) started dating six months ago. And strangely, in spite
of our both a) being Johnnies, b) having lived in the same
mountain town for decades, *and* c) my having worked for
and been friends with his ex-wife (SF '91--if you're lurking,
hi Julia! :o) for aeons, we'd somehow never met until now.
Which may very well be the secret, if there is one, to our
current, if relatively fledgling, romantic success. We remain
mutually astonished that people our age and with our bitter
experiences (Reader, I married a Cambridge physicist) can
still feel the way we do, id est, profoundly in love; and finally

3. I sometimes wish they had never invented Google. (Uttered
in the tones of Frodo Baggins wailing, "I wish I had never seen
the ring!") Although it's practically an extension of my brain, the
terrible power extended by Google to research the whereabouts
and doings of exes, old friends and prospective mates has surely
gotten more than one of us into trouble on those insomniac nights,
perhaps especially during stomach flu recovery, n'est-ce pas?

Fortunately, Mr. Breslin in his wisdom had already deleted
all his ancient posts to alt.polyamory--a simple process with
which Google Groups will graciously assist, by the way, if
Mr. Whitehill or anyone else is still nervous about how much
of his deathless prose may yet be floating about the aether.
Pedro's only remaining posts are those to rec.gambling.poker,
so my curiosity about his umpteen reasons to be angry at
women in 1996 will remain ungratified; but I am resigned.

This is a strange introduction in more ways than one, but I'm
grateful nonetheless for permission to enter a conversation
in which smart people energetically debate tonglen, Wikipedia
(perhaps http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tonglen could illuminate?),
solutions to global warming and/or the mass relocations it will
incite, and whether the NYT oughn't to have SJC alumni writing
above the fold on a daily basis (at this point I'd have to say:
hell yes, absolutely).

Thank you so much, Mr. Fant, for what have obviously been
years and years of epic labor.

And now I await the "wasting valuable air to insult me with this
twaddle" ripostes, with interest and goodwill.

Yours respectfully, Jennifer Lowe