Globex Corporation Newsletter

I attended the University of South Dakota in Vermillion. A good school, a small school in a small town. USD enrollment when I attended was about 5,000, in a town with a population of about 10,000. Both are much bigger now, but I haven't been back since 1995, so I remember Vermillion as a small town, it's my reality which may or may not still be true.

I have been through Brookings, SD since then. Driving from the Twin Cities to Eastern South Dakota in 1998, a friend and I bought hunting licenses to hunt pheasants in Brookings on our way to the hunt. Brookings didn't look much different than it had the last time I'd been there, but even that was nearly 10 years ago now. I'm sure it's quite different today than it was the last time I drove through.

Brookings is the home to South Dakota State University. SDSU was the arch rival of USD, the big dog among South Dakota Universities. We USD students disliked, hated SDSU and by association the city of Brookings. License plates in South Dakota begin with a number that identify the county the plates were purchased in. Brookings county has the identifier of '6' which my ex-wife noted was the number associated with Satan. She first told me that twenty years ago, and I remember it to this day. Association is great for remembering little bits of information.

I would run into people from Brookings as I lived in the Upper Midwest, not unreasonable as I work in a technical field, many SDSU grads being in fields associated with what I do. When I ran into an SDSU grad while working at DirecTV in Long Beach, CA I was a bit surprised. Surprised, but my feelings for Brookings were now a little different. Brookings was no longer a rival, a city dedicated to evil. Brookings was now that city up the road about two hours, this person didn't represent a rivalry as much as he represented a person in Southern California with a lot in common with me. It didn't matter if he'd attended SDSU, it didn't matter that he was Iranian. We had lots in common, we'd both lived in Rapid City and the Twin Cities, we'd graduated from universities in South Dakota. I'd forgotten my infantile disdain for a community based on a university within its city limits.

I met TIG while living in the RC. I was playing with Patient 957, she was in town working on a friend's play. I didn't think anything of it. Later we posted comments on the same website, she hunted me down, cyber-stalked me as it were, and has been a frequent commenter on The Globex Corporation Newsletter ever since.

Last August, a graduate student, FYA, moved into the building I live in. While I'm not allowed to write about her (blog policy...), for the purposes of this post I will mention that she lived in Brookings while her husband attended graduate school. She even knew who TIG was when I mentioned her real name. That's two fake girlfriends with connections to a small city in Eastern South Dakota. Freaky, huh?

It gets better. In May, I met [someone]. Very early on, she talked about living in Brookings, not just living there, but teaching at SDSU. Over time, our relationship grew, and I can now proudly say that I have a real girlfriend with ties to Brookings.

Life is funny.

BOJ