jtmitchum.com

Depending on your age and on line geekiness, you’ll understand the mechanism that promotes this problem.

You see, when on line chat surged to public availability with services like AOL people learned to get a long in nearly exactly the same way they did in public.

Large amounts of time were spent in poorly formed and easily hacked chat rooms asking what someone looked like. Digital cameras might as well have been on Star Trek, because no one had one. You had to ’scan’ your picture in or come up with a fine list of adjectives, which usually included activities.

I’m 5′10″, 195lb, weight lifter and ex-salon stylist with blue eyes and I swam a lot this summer and (this is my favorite) other people say I look built but nice. U?

On line sexuality was born. A window was all that stood between you and millions of potential ‘others’. These slick and subliminal messages didn’t fool people for long. Before they knew it, chatting on line with ‘hawt’ people really wasn’t much fun if they didn’t’ have anything in common with you.

After all, a few hours of chat (which cost by the hour at that time) wasn’t going to lead to heavy petting, cigarettes and a desire to listen to Enigma…on repeat…loudly.

Locality didn’t matter either. That was the whole point. You could go to school the next day and say ‘I met this girl in Texas’ and really be telling ’some’ truth. Non-chatters asked what they looked like, and chatters started responding with personality descriptions plus the required two or three athletic skills needed to prove you weren’t talking to someone of sub-par looks.

It was an odd time and meeting someone off the Internet was very taboo.

One pattern emerged out of that time that still exists today. I think of them as the common triad of questions, and they are sure to point out that you are hopelessly trying to connect with someone soon.

ASL

This one has a history. It started as ‘Are you male or female?’, then evolved to ‘male or female?’, to ‘m/f?’ to ‘bf/gf?’. ASL, of course, stands for age, sex and location where you live. It’s like asking a college student what major he is going for or asking how long someone has been pregnant because you made eye contact in a shopping checkout line. It’s also annoying as hell. Every five seconds, another person joins the chat room and you have to answer all over again. The Internet is stupid.

Pic?

This one should seem fairly obvious. The person has coyly asked if you have a picture of yourself in no less than 4 keystrokes. A fine move indeed. The trick was to ask first, so you could decide if you had a pic to share or not. Otherwise, you might admit you have one to someone who couldn’t share, thereby giving them an edge on you. Yes, it was (and probably still is) that retarded. This question was a standard as soon as someone responded to your asl. Not having a pic could really blow your chances of not meeting someone you were never going to ‘meet’ anyways. Devastating.

Music?

This was by far my favorite. Sometimes it was hobbies, sometimes interests, but I remember that music seemed to be really defining for some reason. If you were Metallica, Zombie, Anthrax, you weren’t going to waste time with Paul Simon, Dan Folgelberg, Carpenters. Music, after all, is a defining character trait. All people who listen to U2 are cosmopolitan hipsters while anyone Garth Brooks left you wondering how they turned on the computer. This opened the door for the most unsavory type of opinion. ‘I like a little bit of everything’ was the phrase of whores. Cool, smooth and independently thinking, this response was the bane of chatting. Now, we’d actually have to talk to you to figure you out. The Internet is a waste of time.

Don’t get me wrong. One thing I really believe the Internet does well is form cultures based on ideas instead of geography. The veil of a monitor forces people to listen to each other just a little bit harder. This extra level of dedication seems to make intellectual-like romances more likely (until that damn pic question comes up). I have witnessed several friendships that have budded from on line meetings and we’ve all heard of some wedding that owes the ceremony to a chat room. I’m not worried about the sincere singles out there.

What I’m talking about are the interstrumpets. Chatwhores, IRCsluts and other distasteful types. Idiots, really. Minds and egos focused on the joys of cybersexual conversation, plastic coated keyboards, rolls of tissues and several bottled waters for hours of on line orgy fun.

I’m forced to believe there is a reward system at work here. Like the smell of beef with the ringing of the bell, Pavlov’s Internet emerged. The Interstrumpet enters the room, announces the asl, and invariably gets a response.

Upon the appearance of the opposite sex of any age as long as they are at a safe distance, passions rise.

A few mindless statements like “sup?” and “nothin, u?” set the stage for a steamy night of careful keystroking and supple mousing.

“pic?”

“You are hot!” “That’s a pic from a few years back” “Did you get mine?” “32/1.5/24″

I know this is really explicit, but when people click like this, you can tell you are witnessing something Darwin thought for sure had already been bred out of the gene pool since the time of knights in armor.

At this juncture, however, one side will start to feel a wave of self-respect and that’s when the famous third of the triad shows itself.

“What music do you listen to?” “Hip-hop”

Smart move! Hip-hop has the word ‘hip’ in it. Brilliant! Eureeka!

Now that a real personal connection has been made, these two human beings can now bang at the keyboard for the next 5 hours in raw oddly unpoetical fashion.

So why am I bothered? Cause these idiots wander like addicts up and down the superhighway looking for another fix. It’s more direct these days, but it’s like most of them don’t’ like just finding a sex chat room. So the rest of us have to read a million ‘Cyber?’ messages, which really interrupts conversations about Halo or Counter Strike, shit that matters man!

Just make it stop. I’m holding AOL responsible for this. They made the Internets so easy, assholes who normally would go to the dirtiest boob bar in town are now on computers. When are nerds going to be hot if ‘bad boys’ proliferate everywhere?

Are there hot people on Linux?

What music do they listen to?