WE BET YOU THOUGHT WE'D ASK FOR MONEY. WELL, YOU ARE MISTAKEN.  WE WANT YOUR SOUL.

Yes, YOUR soul. You out there – you probably think we don’t see you, but we do. We are Big Brother, we are the Boss of the (BHI) Family – and we are always watching. Right about now you’re procrastinating from finishing that paper or counting down the hours till you can finally leave the office. And you’re bored. You yawn. Your creative energy falters and you feel a familiar longing for the turbulence of teen angst – those times of yore when you constantly felt the urge to compose bitter poetry (if only you had the talent…you could have been a world-renown poet by now instead of having to meet the demands of your professor/boss with the IQ of a peanut), and tiny candle flames had the power to inspire you, and you dreamed of saving the world.

But the children of the Third World remain unvaccinated, uneducated and unfed; and candle flames remind you only of glaring headlights in rush-hour traffic; and the only thing you can do is reminisce. So you type in www.oocities.org/bhialum into your browser and you search for the little UPDATED! signs to provide a little pick-you-upper, a gift from your high school past. But to no avail – they are gone!* The site seems to have been abandoned. No birds chirping in the garden, no children playing in the yard, no updates! – no upcoming events, no articles, no news. Finally, on a back page you find a little sign:

FORWARDING ADDRESS: COMPLACENCY

The family is gone- che peccato. You panic. Will they force you to follow? You know that your current state of Boredom is on the border of Complacency. And the minute you leave this site without taking action you will be relocated, possibly with no opportunity to return. So you moan “What can I do?”

We hear you, dear alum. We know you will not let this family die or become complacent. We even prepared a Program just for you:

To reiterate, we want your soul. If that is too big of a step for you, any expression thereof will be a good start. Write to us – write anything. Anything is the first step towards something. Think about that. Would you like to be featured as our Profile of the Month? Send us an update on your life and a picture or two. If you need some guidance, send us an email and we’ll give you a questionnaire to aid you in creating your profile. Make sure your contact information is updated in our Directory. We have tried contacting some alums and received an exceptionally low response possibly because the emails never reached their intended destination. Also, make sure that your friends’ information is updated – if it is not, ask them to email us right away. Write an article, story, poem, rambling thoughts, religious thoughts, doubtful thoughts, angry thoughts, happy thoughts – no thoughts at all? You can even write about your air-headedness! Send us Mazal Tov news. Let us share in the excitement. You came to the site to reminisce, right? But no one’s reminiscing, it seems. Send us your high school memories… any short anecdote or long epic is appropriate. Like doing research? Notice that our About BHI page is virtually empty. Fill it! and receive a virtual hug from the BHI Family. Do the Yom Tov pages seem impersonal or insufficient? Create the next Yom Tov page or just email us some ultra-special Yom Tov trivia that you’d like us to include. Finally, if you have any suggestions for the improvement of current features or the introduction of new ones, let us know!

Now your creative energy feels a rebirth. Do not listen to that small voice telling you that complacency may not be too bad. It is bad. It’s polluted. Big Brother knows. Boredom is only a transient state, a commuter state (kind of like New Jersey – you only pass it en route somewhere else – if you live there, you’re weird). From Boredom you must move on, either to Complacency or to Initiative – the choice is yours. Following the Program of the BHI Family may get you only to the boonies of Initiative, but eventually you can move on to its capital, and from there even to the Third World (to save the children, of course). Are we pleading? Well… no, we’re encouraging. It would be such a shame to see the demise of our lovely site, especially in its “This is only a test” stage. So please do contribute. Give us your soul - or a little piece of it - to help keep ours alive.

SPASIBO, ADMINISTRATION

* Please note - since the writing of this appeal, some UPDATED! signs have indeed been added to the site (you can see them on our home page). This however, does not invalidate our request. We still need & want to hear from you!! In fact, of the recent additions, none came from alums, which is, undeniably, a pity. As a new class of BHIers joins our Alumnae Link, we hope to receive a much wider response and not to lose anyone to that awful state of complacency. Oh, and by the way, you rock!