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I need to take another picture of my computer,
I think. I'm just looking around at all the stuff I have here . . . and I just added
another one today--Rocket the Blue Jay, a Beanie Baby from McDonald's.
I didn't bring the camera with me today, but maybe I'll try to do that later
this week. It's beginning to get a little ridiculous, probably. On top of the
monitor there's Kiwi the Australian Beanie Baby, Christmas Eeyore wearing a set
of reindeer antlers, and Thumper the Aromatherapy Rabbit.
Babe the Sheep Pig sits on one speaker, and Iggy the Iguana Beanie Baby sits on
the other one, with Super Piglet in front of it, and Ratbert beside him, on top of
my box of business cards, and straddling a little travel clock.
A purple Intel Bunny Suit guy hangs from a high intensity lamp; a rubber piglet sits
on the lamp base, and Francis the Lady Bug puts up his dukes in front of the lamp . . .
The little ant princess, Dot, sits on her leaf vehicle in front of a stack of books,
Hopper the Evil Grasshopper postures over by the microphone, and the little blue
plastic Furby is sheltered underneath the monitor.
And this week I've added Freckles (currently lounging on top of the CDs),
Antsy (peering endearingly out of the pen mug) and Rocket, who hasn't found
a place yet . . .
Have I gone too far? Perhaps. Oh--and there's a terry cloth
monkey sitting on top of the webcam box and Zip the little black cat temporarily
crouching on top of my wrist rest, a very comfy place to be, I imagine.
This
pisses me off, and I apologize for using that expression, but "annoyed" or
"irritated" doesn't quite cut it. I was never close to "Kat;" I never
considered her a friend, but I helped "her" out by being one of the first
diarists to join Open Pages, and we had quite a few conversations back and forth about
how to go about starting it up.
I was sorry to see the journal stop, and didn't really understand why, but I didn't
pursue it. I figured life, with all its attendant problems and complications, had
intruded, making the online journal superfluous.
And I don't know Ryan, and I've never found his journal especially interesting, even
though it pops up on most lists of the best ones. So I don't feel any sympathy for him,
particularly as he describes his sociological experiment gone awry . . .
At least I did my fictional entry on April Fool's Day, and for only one day, and I
could hardly wait until the next day to confess my deception. I only really
fooled a couple of people, people who had come late to the journal and weren't
completely familiar with me and my life. And those I did fool, I felt terribly
guilty about. That was the first time I ever tried to pretend to be someone
else, and it will be the last. It was a great joke, but too disturbing to continue.
It's fun to make up someone, to make up a personality, to see if you can do it, see
if you can make them real. But I think it goes over the line to correspond with
people as if you are that person, to manipulate them and deceive them into
thinking you're someone that you're not. It's done all the time, I know. You don't
really have any idea if the person you're talking to online is a 15 year old boy or a 63 year
old woman. On the Internet, no one knows you're a dog . . .
Every time this happens, every time someone "comes out" and confesses that
they aren't who we thought they were, it chips away a little bit more at whatever
tenuous credibility we have, those of us who continue to do this.
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