Once or twice a semester I’ll treat myself to a flavored coffee from a coffee shop nearby. Usually, I get a vanilla latte. Not the biggest one and not the smallest one.

Yesterday I thought this is a fine day for Latte Time! and proceeded to my local latte dispensary. I noticed another patron in a typically Nashvillian dark plaid shirt with pearl buttons. He had a backpack that a lot of college students seem to have, one from a camping outfitter or sporting goods manufacturer, and he also wore a hat that struck me as one I’d never wear, and also as a hat that, if a friend picked it up in a store and said “How ’bout this?”, I’d laugh at and disparage. A trendy hat, something a person might wear to make a statement. A statement like, “Hey, I’m trendy.”

Coffee soon in hand, I walked out of the shop and on to campus. I took a random route because when I was in high school I lived on an Army base and was bombarded with Armed Forces Television Network “commercials” that emphasized tactics like varying your routes of travel. Why? To confuse spies, of course. The paths on campus are indirect and winding enough to cause a fair amount of confusion anyway, but I jumbled up my route to be safe.

And what should I discover as I approach an intersection of paths in the middle of campus about five minutes later? The hat guy from the coffee shop approaching from my right. It was instantly apparent that if we both continued walking at the same speed we’d collide in a mess of latte, expensive hats, whatever triple- or quadruple-combination-name drink he was holding, and a fair amount of private school college student and/or faculty angst.

Do you ever hear stories about how people meet unexpectedly, through random chance, and it’s a life-changing thing? Those stories where a person or couple sits there and goes on and on about What if this? or What if that?, as if a tiny little moment like a stop sign or a loose shoelace or a bug on the neck or a mix-up of an order could have delayed what turned out to be an incredibly important meeting?

Well, this was kind of like that except not at all. I slowed down and the guy walked past and we didn’t collide.

Then, as I thought about all the things that could have kept us from meeting at that exact intersection at that exact second, I thought Uh oh, that’s got to be more than just coincidence! and worried that I wasn’t supposed to slow down and dodge Hat Guy. Maybe I was supposed to smash into him, or at least say, “Hey, coffee buddy!”

Now I’ll never know. Except maybe I will, if I go back to that coffee shop tomorrow morning, or next Tuesday morning, and order the same thing at the same time and look out for a guy wearing clothes I don’t like and then follow him and trip him at the intersection of paths and shout, “This is what we were supposed to do last week! What were you going to tell me?! I’m ready now, my eyes have been opened and we shall now have one of those moments we’ll tell our friends and family about for years and years and…”

Noooooooooo. I think I’ll just stick to making my own coffee. This is why I shouldn’t go out on my own early in the morning without proper preparation.

Before computers and/or Internet: Read a book. At the end of a chapter, make a choice. Depending on choice, go to a different page in the book and imagine that you’re part of the story you’re reading.

With computers and/or Internet: See anything you want almost immediately.

I know, it’s not that easy. But it’s the simplicity of the books compared to our “entertainment technology” today that struck me — when I think about CYOA, I can’t help but consider them artifacts from a time when our brains worked differently. But didn’t, really, because we’re always looking for interactive games and stories.

And one day, surely, an iPhone will be an artifact. What’s after that?

I’m happy to see that CYOA is still out there. Check out “Zombie Penpal,” with 13 possible endings!

Or, I don’t know, maybe it’s all the same thing: stories. Different forms, but we’re always telling stories. I don’t think that will change, whether it’s via Kindle, printed pages, chips in our brains, etc. etc.

To keep things vague for the sake of half-privacy, I’ll just say that I’m teaching this fall at the same school from which I graduated in May. Today I’ll kick off three writing-intensive literature classes that I’ve decided will focus on the use(s) of humor in contemporary fiction. While the prospect of talking about funny stories is attractive, I’m currently much more interested in the classroom technology at my disposal — video screens, automated blinds, a computer built into the lectern, etc. My goal is to dedicate at least one class exclusively to watching YouTube videos.

Even better than all that fanciness, though, is the blue chalkboard in one of the rooms. Here it is:

You can’t beat a blue chalkboard. Now I need some multicolored chalk.

There’s an interesting and relevant article in the New York Times today called The Web Means the End of Forgetting. It’s about the idea that we’re not allowed to forget and/or learn from mistakes or other past experiences because everything we post online (or that others post about us) is saved indefinitely and can be recalled with the click of a button.

In a recent book, “Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age,” the cyberscholar Viktor Mayer-Schönberger cites Stacy Snyder’s case as a reminder of the importance of “societal forgetting.” By “erasing external memories,” he says in the book, “our society accepts that human beings evolve over time, that we have the capacity to learn from past experiences and adjust our behavior.” In traditional societies, where missteps are observed but not necessarily recorded, the limits of human memory ensure that people’s sins are eventually forgotten. By contrast, Mayer-Schönberger notes, a society in which everything is recorded “will forever tether us to all our past actions, making it impossible, in practice, to escape them.” He concludes that “without some form of forgetting, forgiving becomes a difficult undertaking.”

It’s often said that we live in a permissive era, one with infinite second chances. But the truth is that for a great many people, the permanent memory bank of the Web increasingly means there are no second chances — no opportunities to escape a scarlet letter in your digital past. Now the worst thing you’ve done is often the first thing everyone knows about you.

(Stacy Snyder was denied a teaching degree because of a MySpace photo.)

Those last lines sound dramatic. “A great many people,” or a few notable screw-ups? For every Stacy Snyder held up as an example in the near-continuous stream of articles about cyber-fears, there are probably millions of people who’ve done just fine keeping their “worst things” off the streets. Or they’ve at least kept those things within the realm of standard gossip circles like people did in the good ol’ days. Plus, odds are quite high that the people included in that “everyone” probably don’t care quite as much about you or me as we’d like to think.

But I get the idea — it’s difficult to undo mistakes if you’re putting an unfiltered or lazily filtered textual/photographic narration of your life events into multiple online content distribution systems. Everything goes out to a bunch of people, and it’s hard to reel it all back in.

This is a long way of saying that I’ll be scaling back a bit on posts here once mid-August rolls around. But after all this, it’s not out of cyberdrama fears…it’s more about time management. I have some classes to teach, writing to write, and sleeping to sleep. I’ll save the cyberdrama for when I’m trying to sell something — then I’ll stage an appropriately inappropriate incident, start a Twitter account, and go to town destroying and then redeeming my online identity.

This weekend I read an article called “The Food Bubble” that appeared in the July issue of Harper’s Magazine. The overall point (and I’m summarizing this poorly, I’m sure) is that investment companies created a “food bubble” by toying with commodities between 1990 and 2008. The result: more people went without food than if everything had been left alone, all so investors could make more money.

But I don’t want to get into the details. I don’t understand them. All I want to do is post the part that made me laugh (emphasis mine):

…At which point Mr. Silver interrupted my monologue.

Index-fund buying had pushed up the price of the Chicago contract, he said, until the price of a wheat future had come to equal the spot price of wheat on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange–and still, the futures price surged. The result was contango.

I gave Mr. Silver a blank look. Contango, he explained, describes a market in which…

When I first read “contango” I thought it was a typo. Then I re-imagined this as a scene from a noir crime novel, or Star Wars, or Dumb and Dumber. “Contango” is the perfect “result” or end to any sort of situation or description.

“I took the red pill and the blue pill, then washed it down with Maalox. The result: CONTANGO.”

“She burned my clothes on the lawn. I shaved her Pomeranian. Totally CONTANGO.”

“I tell you what, grilled cheese sandwiches with jelly on them and a cup of buttermilk…mmmmmm CONTANGO!”

Thank you, economics.

I’m looking forward to Senate Wrestlemania events on pay-per-view instead of elections. Maybe a steel cage match to decide the presidency. And imagine the combination of wrestling announcers with cable news hosts! Sounds like heaven.