Just went on a chat room and am making friends with total internet strangers, for the first time in 8 years.
I predict I will be completely addicted to this by next week, like how I was 2 years ago with ChatRoulette.
And with Lord of The Rings Fanatics Plaza ages 12-14.
It’s so terrifying, but so gratifying, and this whole OBSESSED INTERNET FREAK part of my soul starts alighting again. The blink of the IM notification - the instant gratification of immediate emotional intimacy with people who are only represented by a screenname and typed letters…
OMFG I miss MSN, I miss spending 6 hours a night on it in highschool.
I think I’ve avoided being a TOTAL INTERNET WEIRDO, just been semi internet weirdo, for the past few years because of… stigma? Lack of others IRL who could relate to make it seem socially-normalized? The big social media where suddenly everyone was an internet communicator all the time, but only on myspace/facebook/twitter etc, not just out there all the time talking to people they only know through the internet medium? And just the OUT THERE, WEIRD, MESSAGE BOARD CHATROOM INTERNET of freaks in the Deep Internet, beyond the waters of 2.0 and blogosphere, coming together in communities sort of related to their IRL ones but enough difference to create a true strong escaspist fantasy land?
It’s all so compelling, and so easy to get sucked into. I love it too much and have avoided it since getting waaaaaaaaaaay too into the Jezebel comment boards and anything. Like, making friends and wanting to go to meet ups. I was very depressed at this time. (I recall a scene of sitting in my half empty residence room, my roommate who I had had a falling out after being 4 month BFFs with had finally left and never said goodbye, leaving everything in a tragic mess to sort of embrace an aesthetic nihiliism of the fatalistic feeling, and sitting in the window, a bit too dangerously, leaning against the window ever so slightly, a little too often, sometimes with a daring force, perhaps trying to tempt the survival instinct with fear, the fear to be motivated and try to fix life and crawl out of it, instead of just wallowing as it gets deeper, but that didn’t really happen just like that, so I tried to embrace a melodramatic tragic attitude, except I really did have a melodramatic tragic attitude that was real and not imagined [and never really imagined, only imaged to be imagined] and I found a an entire box cuban cigars left in the common room of my residence hall by some drunk, idiot, or ADD rich kid who forgot them, so I took like ten and just sat chainsmoking fucking cuban cigars out the residence window, which I’m pretty sure I thought to make me seem like this Tragic Sensitive Writer Artist Type, definitely more masculine and cool [because depression is only cool if you’re a dude, I thought #TANGENTIAL FEMINIST COMMENTARY ON MENTAL ILLNESS, GENDER AND ABUSE IN INTIMATE RELATIONSHIPS] anyway like some sort of
TOUGH
STOIC
NIHIILIST
MAN.
All while getting really into the Jezebel comment boards, and having sitting there on them for 8 hours a day for a few days being kind of a Rock Bottom (for that episode, not life) and getting increasingly annoyed with the cutesy humour culture there, — not on the comment boards in general but the comment boards on friday and saturday night, when they became a place people hung out every night.
annoyed by the cutesy humour of people who HUNG OUT ON JEZEBEL COMMENT BOARDS EVERY FRIDAY AND SATURDAY NIGHT
and then being like OH DUH WE ARE ALL LONELY LOSERS WITH NO ACTUAL FRIENDS, THE INTERNET IS NOT REAL LIFE.
So I felt sad and I wondered if the other Jezebelians were also sad, and so I posted a comment asking if how they felt about spending so much time online, and that i’m not judging them because I do it too but do they find that it’s having a negative impact on their lives, because it’s having a negative impact/caused by a negative impact/some sort of correlated situation with an unclear causal relationship thingy with my life, and that I was lonely and were they lonely too and how did they feel about relying on the false intimacy of merely online connection, and had they read Microserfs, and were they happy and if they were happy why were they here and is it okay to just be like this do you know the kind of people who are on the internet all the time with e-friends who have more e-friends than real friends and rely on them to get through tough times, was it ok with be alone IRL and intimate online, and didn’t that bother anyone sometime?
And they all got totally offended and were all sarcastically “oh well bless her heart”
and some point after that I stopped coming back.
And yet this Autostraddle chat!
So exciting, and inviting. Spent hours on Autostraddle, they even have a camp! They’re queer and feminist and in a cool way mostly but that’s not the only thing, they have a sense of humour I love and such engaging way of talking and involved community and opportunities for IRL meet ups and the even more enchanting element of possible romantic/sexual connection with other women that you’d also love to be friends with if you weren’t attracted to them but also TOTAL INTERNET WEIRDOS who are super positive and seem to make it seem okay.
But then, there’s this Gary Barlow song.
“So your home by the phone, getting stoned all alone,
with your chatroom friends, your cons and ramones,
But the phone don’t ring, and Joey just sings sedated, you gotta learn to hate it”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vDrRm72KIow
a quite problematic and yet rather touching and still haunting after 8 years.
