Thu | May 25, 2006
AIM
If you want to cultivate the obsessive compulsive elements of your personality, sign up for AIM. Add a bunch of people you barely know to your "buddy" list. Watch your "buddies" log on and off.
Begin the obsession. You know when they're online. They know when you're online. You know that they know, and you detect patterns in their online behavior as well as your own. You know what time they go to lunch, whether they get to work early, and whether they leave late.
Once it has a hold on you, try to communicate about your life via the patterns of your computer habits. Say "I am a night person" by staying on late. Or log off at 11, even though you are still online, because you don't want them to know you're up.
But remember you barely know them; you hardly talk to them. It is like being in a crowded place and having someone walk by and brush ever so barely by. Maybe you didn't even touch-- just your clothes did, or the air was disrupted between you. You want to talk but you never do. You just keep walking by, and watching each other. And wondering if the other one is watching or if it was all just a coincidence.
You brush shoulders virtually by being online at the same time as they are. Once you see someone online at a certain time you try to be online at about the same time the next day. If that doesn't work you try again for one or two more days, and also the same day next week. You want a pattern but sometimes there isn't one. You log on hoping a person will be online and they're not and you're disappointed. Vengeful, you try to be random too.
You aren't random. You're in front of the screen all the time. You're obsessed, remember? You start to use away messages and invisibility and linked screennames. These are things you used to not bother with but now they give you something to do. You put up an away message knowing full well that no one was going to try to IM you anyway.
Stop.
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