Don't you hate it when, after spending a couple of days with friends you haven't seen in 4 or 5 years, you start feeling nostalgic for other old friends you've lost touch with. Then, late one Saturday night while you're lying in bed unable to fall asleep, your mind drifts to one particular woman you were close to for a brief period about 5 years ago, a woman you very well might have ended up in a serious relationship with had it not been for the fact that you both wound up in emotionally oppressive jobs that sucked both your wills to connect with other human beings into nonexistence, thereby causing you to lose touch with one another. And even when one of her friends told you a few months later that you should really give this woman a call, it just didn't click with you that you should really give this woman a call. Then, 5 years later, laying in bed unable to fall asleep you just can't stop wondering whatever happened to her, so you get out of bed and go to the computer and Google her to see if you can find her. And you immediately do. You're happy to learn that she no longer works in that emotionally oppressive job (neither do you) and that she has a very successful career in a completely different city. You also notice that she still has the same last name, which means there's a halfway decent chance she's still single. Not that you really think anything could develop now. After all, you live thousands of miles apart and haven't spoken for 5 years. But still you think maybe you should email her and reestablish contact. If nothing else, this was someone you were really close to for a short while, and it might be cool to catch up with her. While you're pondering whether or not to drop her line, you dig a little deeper into those Google search results and find a couple of blogs that she writes. The first one is really interesting (and confirms your suspicion that she's still single -- causing your mind to wander in places it really shouldn't). Feeling fairly certain that you will, in fact, email her on Monday, you go to the other blog she writes and immediately discover that sometime during the 5 years you've been out of touch that this woman has become a born-again evangelical Christian and can't stop writing about God, Jesus, her faith, and the Bible. She even quotes liberally from Contemporary Christian song lyrics. And the first thought you have upon learning of this development is a rather self-aggrandizing one: If you had stayed in touch with this woman, or at least reestablished contact back when her friend told you to call her, could you have prevented her from taking this drastic turn? But then you remember that back when you knew this woman 5 years ago, you weren't the devout agnostic that you are now. In fact, you were struggling pretty heavily with your faith, trying to find a way to make Catholicism work for you any way you could. With this in mind, you realize that there's probably a halfway decent chance that, had you stayed in contact with her and initiated the relationship that seemed briefly inevitable, your own path would have been a much different one, and you might have been a part of that conversion yourself. Had that happened, you might very well be using your own blog to pontificate on the afterlife while sprinkling in quotes from the oeuvre of Jaci Velasquez. And with all these existential thoughts racing through your mind you're once again lying in bed unable to sleep because you're now pondering the delicate balance the road of your life has held and how easily it could have veered in very different directions, not just five years ago but at any number of crossroads over the years. Yet, there you now lie, the person you've become, completely unable to fall asleep. And you ask yourself, why did I have to think of this woman tonight? That really grinds my gears!