A vague and gnawing pang of anxiety centered around an IM window that has lulled. During this time an individual feels unsure whether they have offended the IM recipient, committed a breach of IM etiquette, or have otherwise spoilt the presentation of themselves carefully crafted thus far thanks to the miracles of the textual medium. The individual must be at least vaguely aware that they are being vaguely paranoid, and must tell themselves things like ‘he probably just stepped away from the keyboard’ or ‘I know she is at work right now so perhaps she has stopped replying because she is busy.’I'm not an IM guy, but I must rather meekly admit to feeling the anxiety of that one. YEARS and years ago I was lovesick for a young lady to a degree so shameful, so emasculating both in my words and actions throughout any given day, so disgustingly embarrassing that I found myself in that quicksand of love & despair we've all found ourselves thrashing, to which we may alert ONLY our single closest confidant on the daily ups and downs of our already strained heartstrings, which we know are soon to be broken all to hell anyways in spite of our most Herculean of efforts. Or, I suppose, years later you can just tell hundreds of strangers on what will soon be known as a "weblog," , but anyways...
At the peak of my shameful display of "please love me!!" 2nd-grade histrionics, whenever milady was slow to return an email, I'd start fidgeting with anxiety since COURSE she was desperately trying to email me back at this moment (random, say, Tuesday morning, 10:30amish) to finally, officially declare requited love for me, probably sending a rendezvous location for me to meet her in 30 minutes (this was before I or most people had a cellphone) so we could begin our blissful life of of being dedicated to each other, and I hadn't gotten the email because surely the Internet itself had just crapped out, which was about to make me miss out on my one true love forever. I would be, if I recall correctly, and I believe I do, rather frenzied.
After guzzling a liter of so of Diet Coke while hitting CHECK MAIL (or whatever the fuck the equivalent was back in the Dark Ages of Hotmail) approximately 91,000 times, finally I would shoot an as-casual-as-could-seem possible, just shootin' the breeze email over to Op, "hey, checking to see if my email is down, hit me back." To which he would reply within about 30 seconds. "Works here, pods." Of course once he caught on to what I was doing with my little recon/scouting emails, his replies would come in about 4 seconds, with a MUCH more gleeful tone: "working great, pods! :)" Grrrr.
Sigh. Memories. Of the internet. That's weird, isn't it?
No comments:
Post a Comment