was a young and tender freshperson at UC Santa Cruz in 1989, and with the encouragement of my friend Tara I signed up for a ucscb account: munchen@ucscb. There's a story behind munchen but I won't bore you with that. Let's just say it was a nickname.

Armed with my account and again with the encouragement of Tara, I logged on to icb. I immediately encountered gristle, who already scared me a little, and he noted my name and stated, "Crunchin' on the munchen!", and various other lewd and somewhat threatening comments.

So I fled in terror, from ucscb accounts, icb, gristle, and eventually, the Cowell dorms.

About two years later, toughened by off-campus living and having gotten used
to the likes of banshee, salguod, lafolle, and yes, even lerner, I signed up
for a different account: kitten@cats. Kitten was yet another nickname given
to me by a high school friend who used it sarcastically, because if you know
me at all you know that I am NOT very kitten-like.

I stayed kitten for the rest of my college years, getting in to the occasional
snit (I refuse to say catfight) on icb with another kitten at gatech.edu who
thought she had some sort of damn copyright. I think banshee booted her off
icb a couple of times for me--thanks, banshee. Hey, did he ever graduate?
Does anyone know...?