This isn’t going to be a well thought out post, no more than most, anyway. I do tend to ruminate on what I’m going to write over days or week, even years, sometimes. It just finally gets to the point where I have so many individual pithy comments or compelling reasons to write, that I finally do so. And then I sit, like I am now, and just start writing. No notes, just half formed thoughts at the top of my brain. That said…
During this “unprecedented time,” I discovered things seemed somewhat familiar to me. Back in the bad times, the no-job-no-girlfriend-no-friends-no-hope era of my life, when I was self-isolating for social anxiety, not -distancing. And things were very like they are now. I wasn’t afraid of getting sick, or cooties, even, I was just afraid everyone that saw me would have something bad to say about me. And I was living in Maine, at the time. Those are a very forthright people. They don’t have any issue letting you know your jeans need washing, or your hair is unkempt, or even if your phone ringer is too loud. I just avoided leaving the apartment.
Fortunately for my long-term survival, I’m actually pretty gregarious, and that didn’t change even when I hated myself and I projected that on the world. (It’s a phycological term. I didn’t act out and destroy things, or people. I “Projected” the feelings I had for myself in the eyes of other people of the world. They HAD to hate me as much as I hated myself, right?) So, the growing feelings of self-isolation was countered by my inner nature, and I had to stay in contact with people, in some way.
I used chat apps to stay in contact. My best friend for term-life, (As I call him, now. He’s the subject of the lost a friend post I wrote a couple years ago.) some of my family, and folks back in Texas that I still cared about. (Though for the sister that lived in the same town I used my phone and called her. Radical, right?) And for the unknown people, I used random chat apps. Do you remember Chat Roulette? Is it even a thing, anymore? It was this radical concept, back then. You log in with a username you picked, or you could accept the random one you were assigned. And then you hit a button, and you were connected with someone else who hitting the button at the same time. It didn’t happen immediately, every time, and you didn’t have to keep hitting the button. You hit it, waited, and within a few seconds, someone would pop into view. Yes, view, it was a video chat thing.
And, of COURSE, that led to the problem with the entire app. You take random, and add anonymity, hence no accountability, and guess what you get? Dick pics, galore. 99 of 100 connected strangers that I saw were some dude exposing himself. And my settings said I preferred to talk to females. So either that setting was just for show, or perhaps all the guys registered as female, or their settings of “I want to connect to anyone” overrode my settings, but I saw a LOT of guys, with lots of beer bellies, and lots of Vienna sausages without the tin cup.
That amused me for about 10 minutes, and then I deleted the app, and didn’t go back. Then there was Omeagle. Same sort of app, but chat only, so not so many dick pics, but a lot of M for F, you F? Or just the F? actually. If I actually connected to a girl, there was no assurance they really were female. But it was a connection, of a sort, and that app was useful, for a little while.
Flash forward to today. I do have a job, and I am fond of myself, so I’m much improved. But WFH and staying home to avoid the COVID mess is seriously familiar. I don’t call out, much, but Skype is a daily work tool, and there are new chat apps all the time, and I have used them, just because. One that I have used for a few years is kinda both cool and flawed. You can use it anonymously, just create a username, and chat in rooms, or privately in Direct Message with a single user. There is also a function where you can just randomly chat with someone. You can set your own profile to not accept these, but I leave mine open, just for fun. And it sometimes is fun. Sometimes it’s a dick pic. But not as much as otherwise.
On this app, you can report folks, and it has a function where an offender can get tossed in app jail, where they are not allowed general chat for a period of time, and they lose benny points. (Benny points can be used to make your avatar prettier, or even disallow people with too few of their own benny points to DM you.) Also, you can block a person from chatting with you. If you’re blocked, you cannot DM them, and even more significantly, you cannot see anything that person says in a public channel. So, there’s more accountability there. A jailed user can create a new profile, and keep harassing, of course, it’s still anonymous. But the random thing is still random, and I have never had a random chat person contact me twice with different user accounts. (Unless they were really sly, I guess.)
I don’t have long-term chats with Randoms, though. Typically, they pop up, I say hi, and they ask how I am, I respond, our locations are disclosed, and sometimes that prompts more chat. Sometimes, they just stop talking, and on occasion, I get blocked. (Just the other day, a random popped up, and I thought it went well. Then “She” said “I need to get some sleep. Bye” and blocked me! Didn’t just sign off, blocked me. That was new. If I said something really offensive, I could see it, but “Hi, yeah, I’m in Oregon, just north of you!” seems innocuous enough. It’s not like I’m going to drive south just for 5 hours to breathe on her.)
But once in a blue moon, something good comes up. Like this time. A little over a month ago, (or 2 months, even, it’s been a while, and months run together lately) a person hit me up. I think it was a random, but then again, I’m not sure. Because random chats start with a script that pops up in my window. “Hi, I’d like to have a chat with you. Or, you can block me. If you want to chat, say hi!” or something like that. It’s standard, and happen all the time. This time, it didn’t happen, but I will allow that a technical glitch might have happened, too. But I will say that I don’t think she found me in a room I chat in, and DMed me from there. I wasn’t in any rooms that day, and in fact had kind of stopped chatting in the rooms anyway. The anime room I liked tended to devolve into arguments, the Oregon room was just banal, and other rooms had similar distasteful auras after a while. So, I just log on, check messages (Usually there aren’t any) and gather my daily bonus bennys. The app notifies me to “Check your messages”, and I hate the little red spot that sticks on the app if I ignore it, so I check in.
On this day, after I logged in, I got a chat bubble. I looked, and it was a person just saying hi. No script, but I had never met this person, so I just assumed it was random, and the script failed. I’ll never know the truth of the matter, I don’t think. (Then again, there is a room she might have found me in, that I’d never expect her in, except recently I found out she likes more extreme things than I first thought. So maybe in that weird room with the funny stories?) But she said hi, I said hi back, and she asked if I’d send her a gift. (A gift costs bennys and it grants the receiver with half of the bennys you spend.) She didn’t promise to do anything in return, just asked for a rose. I was charmed by this honesty, and sent her one.
This prompted further communication. I asked why she asked for it, and she told me she wanted to build one of those chat walls. I get that, girls on the app are inundated with chats, whether they want them or not. And we just kept chatting.
Before we go any further, I was to stipulate that she’s a real female. We’ve been chatting for ages, now, and from little things to bigger ones, she hasn’t triggered any bells that she’s not what she says she is. I have very good radar, after all these years. Sometimes I still chat with a fake, if they are amusing enough, but only for a time. And if they ask for money, I just cut them off.
[Aside: a few months ago, another random chat went further than the app. Due to the apps restrictions, (No url links, you can’t even mention a different chat app by name, and even the word Porn will get you in trouble) we moved to another chat app. And she upfront asked for some money. Just $20, and I just liked how she didn’t game me, so I sent it to her. We stayed talking for a few months, but she was too wild for me in the end, and I haven’t heard from her in ages. I’m a softy, but only in certain cases.]
Lily and I have been chatting for a while, now. And I know there’s no honest way we’ll be together. She lives half a world away, and in a family that would faint if she dated a white dude. But even so, I’m very fond of her. We have deep differences that don’t matter, we use them as learning opportunities. And we have similar interests that we enjoy mentioning to each other. Like Scrubs. She’s a medical intern, and Scrubs is one of my favorite shows of all time, so I had to ask her if she’d ever seen it. She hadn’t, and we spent a good amount of time trying to find it for her to watch. And she needed it with English subtitles, so help her understand English better, as well as just understand it, of course. (She complains that I speak too fast, so no way that show is easy. LOL) I looked into finding her with region appropriate DVD sets, even, but it turns out she watches everything on her phone, doesn’t even have a TV, much less a DVD player. Millennials.
She doesn’t have Hulu there and they don’t have Scrubs on her Hulu anyway. I thought maybe Netflix but no dice there, either. (International licensing is both interesting, and mind-blowingly dull. Enjoy that dichotomy) After many other ideas were thought of and tossed out, she finally found it on a streaming service she has access to, with subtitles. This took a week or more, but I don’t think she was looking as hard as I was. This is one of the warning signs I should have paid some attention to.
She’s a busy person, she is a medical intern, with all that entails, 12-hour shifts, not a lot of time left after working, eating and sleeping. Plus, she has a roommate, and a food delivery service that she has to pay. (Yeah, she has food delivered every day, lucky girl) And the guy that runs that service is like an uncle to her, so if he comes by, she is gone for a while chatting with him. But she still finds time to say hi to me and chat for good amounts of time, and that makes me feel pretty special.
She also has other guys she chats with in the App. Her bennys went up so fast, I had to ask her why. Turns out she’s a pretty big flirt in the channels she chats in, posts sexy pictures on occasion, and that leads to lots of gifts. I did ask her why she never sent me a sexy pic. She told me “We’re friends, Friends don’t share sexy pics.”
Oh, goodness. The Friend Zone. I know that route so well, I can sell guided tours. “On your left, is the study buddy you were attracted to so much, you helped her study poetry. You both got an A, and she celebrated with her boyfriend that was not you.” On the right, is the fluffy girl that likes you, and she says it clearly, but you demurred because you liked her friend, and she calls you every name in the book, and turns that friend against you.” And so on. Still, the sting is the same, no matter how many times you hear it. At least that’s my feeling.
And she has troubles too, of course, over the course of two days, she lost over 100K of her bennys, she called some guy a name (that he likely earned, but it’s still not allowed) and he reported her, and off to jail she went, for 24 hours, and a lost of half her treasure. Then the next day, a guy she told no to, reported her for something bogus, and she got jailed, again, and her Benny level was down at mine, after. And they don’t give bennys back, even if it’s a bogus report. And the guy kept claiming he didn’t do it, but she knows he did.
This is another warning sign, to me. She’s more invested in this app that I am. I had almost deleted it a few times, but just didn’t. She’s literally the only person I chat with on it, at all. But I’m not the only person she chats with, of course. She likes the abilities that bennys provide, I could care less. She says hi, I respond quickly. I say hi first, it might take a while. I know and accept that. There’s a power differential there, and it rankles, but I know it’s how it must be.
She has rules, she won’t ever be non-anonymous. She won’t ever give her phone number, email address, or any other chat app handle out. This is the only app anyone can talk to her on. (Well, there’s also this board game app, a lot like Sorry! And you can actually talk on it while you play the game, and she has a nice voice, but it’s just as anonymous. That’s how I know I talk too fast for her, she complained to me about it.) and that kind of comes up on occasion.
Like when we started talking about movies. I have an extensive movie collection. So many that there are some I haven’t even watched yet, but I will someday. And I have been doing the work of moving my collection into the cloud. And there’s an app called Movies Anywhere that has being making that very nifty. They even have a new Pandemic prompted feature called Watch Together. If you and another person (with a MA account) have the same movie in your libraries, you can fire up Watch together, and watch in at the same time, emojis and stuff available to pop on screen during it. And if the other person does not have the title, there’s another feature called Screen Time. I can loan out a movie to a person (again, they have to have a MA account) and they have it to watch for a couple days, free. And you can Watch Together a loaned movie! It’s a super cool thing that is great for our current times. (Netflix and Xbox 360 had that ability back 10 years ago. It was called Watch party, and you could watch with your avatars on the front row, MST3K style, or not, and voice chat was also possible, with Xbox Plus chat. They stopped that ages ago. Although Netflix brought it back with browser support, not Xbox, recently, and I don’t think there’s voice chat. I haven’t tried it, though.)
And in talking, she discovered I had some movies she really wanted to see, and I was very willing to watch with her. So, we start making plans, and I tell her that’ll be great, you just need to make sure MA is an app there. We made more plans, like I have to be up at 4AM on Saturday, so she can watch after work that day. I’m ready, and I ask her to make sure she has the app. Then I remind her, the way this works, I have to send a link to the movie to be loaned, and another link for the watch together, and the chat app will not allow links. I promise her that this isn’t why I brought up the movie thing, and it wasn’t. I do think it was a nice side-effect, of course. A little of her breaking down that chat wall, and letting me feel as special to her as she does to me.
A few days into this, she finally lets me know that app isn’t in her country. If it were me, and I was told to check for an app I would have done it right away, she takes a few days. She had told me earlier, back in the Scrubs finding days, that her internet is really poor when she’s at home. Probably too many users online at that time, very common in big neighborhoods, of course. So, while at work, she’s busy looking busy enough to not get in trouble, and can chat a bit, but I guess looking for an app would be too obvious, so she never did it at work. And then when she first gets home, she needs to shower, eat, talk to roommate, etc. and so might not remember to look, and then it’s evening, and her internet is too spotty to download an app. So, I get why it might take her a few days. But it still rankles, as I’m such a geek, a new app is fun. Why wait to get it? *sigh* And it’s so we can share stuff, and I want to share.
But now that app isn’t there, I’d been googling about it already, and knew MA was going to be there, someday, but isn’t there, yet. And I’m frustrated by this. And I’m chatting with her, letting her know my frustration, and my wish it would have worked. Then, I have a couple other ideas, I could add her as family on Play Movies, or Amazon Prime, the movies we want to watch are on both platforms, that’s one of the reasons MA exists, to share movies with other provides. All my movies on Vudo might not be on MA, but EVERYTHING on MA is on Vudu, iTunes, Prime movies, Play movies, even Fandango (yes, it’s still a thing). And it was my thought we could use the family share thing of one of those.
But here’s the rub. That would take a LOT more personal contact than she has been willing to offer. Yes, she had agreed, however passively, to the link issue, though we never talked specifics. But to make her part of my family requires a full email address, if not more. And that would just freak her out, I’m sure. Again, I don’t blame her for the caution. She’s on the front lines as a hospital worker, and the front lines of a family that is very stern with her. She’s in the front lines of dating, as a pretty woman in county that cannot be described as Woke in anyone’s estimation. She’s sexually liberated in a place where that’s looked down on, severely in times. She’s got reason to guard her privacy.
On the other hand, I know she can trust me, and I think she knows that too. We are friends, and she means the world to me. So why did it get so grumpy when started thinking of the other ideas?
First, she was not chatting very often. She wasn’t saying why she was so slow, either people in the house, flirt talk with other guys, active talk in a chat room about a festival being cancelled due to COVID concerns, all possible. But I just knew I wanted to figure this out, and I can’t do it on my own. She was talking 10-15 minutes to get back to me. And every pause made me think more and more things.
I’m a forward thinker, you might have guessed that from my writings. I game out scenarios on a daily basis, to see where things might end up, if I do this, or I do that. It goes back to my youth, now that I think about it. Way back in my adolescence, I used to have very realistic dreams, and then days or even months later, I’d see what I dreamt playing out in real life. A dream wouldn’t even be active in my mind, actually. I would just feel a sense of déjà vu that was very strong. I’d look at the scene in front of me, and an overlay would settle into place, and I knew, without hesitation what was coming next. It wasn’t really mind-blowing stuff. I saw a car, and knew the driver would get out, then have to shut the door quickly, and press up against the car to avoid another car barreling too close. Or a Ferris wheel, one time, stopping suddenly, mid-rotation, and kids yelling. Very often, I didn’t know how the dream ended as I was watching events play out, but sometimes, I knew the end, and I would just watch for it. It was really fun, till it wasn’t.
One time, I had a dream that was very clear, I can call it up to this day, in full clarity. But as the time, I had forgotten it, completely. And when things started to look familiar, a sense of dread came over me, thought I didn’t know why. And I just started acting differently than my half-formed memory. And the dread went away, and I was better. The dream came back, fully, as a memory after that instinctual reaction, and I’m glad did what I did. I’ll write a full post on that event someday. But for these purposes, that caused me to always think of a way out, or through, or back, every time I think of an event that is to come.
Funny thing, though, no matter what I think, it never comes to pass, not exactly like I consciously thought, ever. (I still have dreams that always seem to play true, but I, out of habit, start babbling a poem, and the déjà vu goes away.) I might think I could get fired, or suspended, and game out every scenario that might cause that, and when the event happens, it’s something totally outside of my imagination. The time I got fired at the medical foam place for example. I knew I was gonna face consequences, but what happened was a surprise.
Yet, I can’t stop myself, I just think through eventualities, all the time. And significant to my predictions, even though specific events don’t match up, my track record of predicting outcomes is pretty solid. I might know I’d fail, I just don’t know the method the failure will take. I might know something will work, but not how it’ll end up working.
So, when she told me the app wasn’t there, and I said, “Yeah, I looked, and it’s not there, yet.” (I should have looked long before that day. I had been trusting her to look, as I’m trying not to be a man-splainy guy, but she didn’t for a long time, so I finally started looking on my own. Right then, she finally decided to look herself. Synchronicity.) And I said “Well, I can think of a couple other options…” and waited for her to answer. And it took a long time. In the intervening minutes, my brain went into future thought. She would have to share her email, at the very least, I’d have to promise to never email her. She’d have to be talked into it. I’d have to be really cautious. I’d have to put myself out there further, in some way. And she’d say no.
By the time she did get back to me, I’d gamed it out a million times, and it always came down to no. There was no yes to be found, in any scenario. This made me even more cranky. I was already frustrated MA wasn’t there, but she was taking a long time to respond, and I started thinking the other guys she was flirty with were occupying her time, and that made me mad at the friend zone thing, and then when she finally responded, my scenarios had failed, again, as she didn’t even respond to my idea proposal with a ‘what’s that?’ or “how can we do this?’ She just said something perfectly nice, but unrelated to anything we were chatting about. My mind went white.
I told her I was getting cranky, and it was near her bedtime, anyway, so just go to bed, I’ll be back later, and signed off.
Then, I started REALLY thinking. Our differences were so great, I was setting myself up for a fall the entire time. I’m too old, too white, and too far, and those are the easy truths. Why would I let myself get so close to her, that I want to do things for her. I shared Scrubs, and she does love it, but why go any further? I’m not comfortable in power imbalances. I just am not. Not if I have more power, or the other person does. And she has ALL the power. She says hi, I respond immediately. I say hi, it might be hours. She asks for a rose, I give. I don’t ask. If she wanted my phone number, it’s hers for the asking, my email, my social security number, even. Yeah, I went way too far in how I care for her. Not only was all the power in her, I gave her some of mine, without noticing it. She’s honest enough that she didn’t take advantage of that, at all, if she even noticed.
And that’s the other part. I notice everything about her, that she allows me to. I offer her anything I have, freely, but she doesn’t pay attention. Plainly, I care about her more than she cares for me. And that’s not healthy for me. Even though she won’t abuse that imbalance, if I can sit here and get cranky about it, then I’m doing it to myself. This is not the way I want it to be.
The next time she said hi, I popped onto the app promptly, as always, but told her I needed some time, I’m not happy. She asked me why. I told her I don’t want to talk about it. She pushed, I pushed back, said NO! But still she asked. I finally told her that if I told her what I was cranky about, it would hurt her, and I didn’t want that. And it would, and I didn’t. I know that it’s all my fault, all my thinking, she is not contributory to this particular grump. She is part of it, of course, but it’s all my own thinking that had put me in this state.
I needed to write this out so that I can have her read it. Typing all this into chat would not work she’d interrupt with questions, denials, or confusion, and I’d be like Doug in Up and go “Squirrel!” at one or another of her comments, and never get my thesis clarified. This is just as much for me as for her. I need to figure out my own screwed-up brain. This is Write Therapy, I guess.
If you’re fan of my writing, I just have to ask, really? I post so very infrequently, I don’t get it. But thank you. I have mental blocks about writing, so I can’t write unless the words are figuratively pushing themselves out of my brain, as is this case.
She’s still sending chats every little bit. The first day, after I insisted for my need for space to think this out, she messaged every couple hours, then again, 12 hours later, and again, 24 hours. I’m at 48 hours, now, and she sent another gentle query, and I know I have missed talking to her, and I want to get back to that. So, I sat down to write this stream of consciousness. Then she can read it, and I won’t have to say it again. Right now, she’s likely in bed, so I won’t chat her back, even if I’ve finished this screed. I might just send a message to read my new article and see how it goes.
(I gamed it out, and it’s not good, so I have to live with that)