On March 14, 2007, a friend emailed me a link to the Frankenstein was a guy! thread. As an English major and long time lover of Frankenstein, this was like dangling a cookie in front of Cookie Monster - I took the bait. A lively email exchanged followed.
And my friend (who was member) posted an expunged version of my comment on why the theory was wrong, wrong, wrong.
After that first thread I started reading the site from time to time, but it wasn't part of my regular routine, until I received an email on March 12, 2008 that my friend had died. He died suddenly, far away from his siblings, estranged from his ex-wife and child. There was no death notice, no obituary, no funeral. His body was cremated and taken back to his home state. His friends were excluded from his memorial service, so they held one of their own.
For the next two years I would visit Metafilter once or twice a week and browse through the threads. During that time I learned that jessamyn was the Jessamyn of librarian.net, a site that I had followed almost religiously years before.
What ultimately spurned me to join Metafilter was my desire to do something to bring some closure to my friend's life. If I missed him, them maybe there were people here who missed him too.
Household Shoes
Metafilter "clicked" for me from the day I joined.
But the MeTa survey on household shoe wearing customs and the thread that spurned the survey has to be my favorite. Because it made me laugh out loud. For extended periods of time.
