I know it's hard for Miss Manners and Dear Abby to keep up with all the changes in the world, so I figure I'll ask all of you guys instead:

So I had this group of friends in my freshman year of college. This would be ten years ago now. We were the kind of group that you think is really close, the kind of friends you're going to have for a lifetime. And the next year you realize you were only friends because you lived in the same hall of the same dorm. Sad but true.

But I get ahead of myself...

My ten-year High School Reunion is in two weeks and I decided not to go, mostly because I fell out of touch with my highschool friends even faster than my freshman friends, but I started getting nostalgic. What happened to all the people who I used to know?

Hello Internet! Forget Classmates, I go straight to Google and The Wedding Channel, to download the dirt.

Pumping names into input fields like the nickels into slots of a Denny's in Reno, I find that Ari Stotland is the proud owner of a "Steak-Home" in Vegas, Dana Weinberger is a Post-Doc at Scripps, and Jeff Karish finished Law School at Harvard.

Suddenly I don't have to go back to my reunion after all. I can find out what I want off the net, and save myself hours of driving or flying.

So back to the etiquette quandary: I'm tossing more names, running out of high school and moving on to freshman year, and I find that my friend Carina Balogh, one of the aforementioned Freshman Friends, just got married last week. Carina and I went to lunch a couple times in the year following the dorms, but we never travelled in any of the same circles. I don't have so much as an email address for her, but suddenly I have the means to buy her and her husband a wedding gift.

Call it nostalgia; call it boredom; call it whatever, but would you call it freaky to get her and her new husband a set of measuring cups, eight years out of the blue?

Well I guess we'll see.

Monday: Amazon Wishlists: Unwitting windows to strangers' souls?