Chat Rooms

There was a simpler time in my life. My only concerns were school (kind of), eating as much chocolate as possible without my mother detecting it, trying to figure out when the hell I was going to finally need my first bra, and finding the best chat rooms. This was approximately age 10, 5th grade. Looking back on it now, I wonder at the wisdom of a 10 year old being in chat rooms. It's an especially dubious proposition giving the number of mole-backed 40-something men living in their parents' basements and seeking young girls as I was. It was the modern-day equivalent of offering children candy from a car. Now, I suppose, they've mostly moved to myspace.

I was liberated in chat rooms. I could say whatever I wanted, be as mean as I wanted, and then sign off and sign on again with a new screenname, try something new. No one knew I was ten, so I pretended I was an oh-so-mature thirteen. Well, in a way, thirteen was a mature age, because it's when I stopped wanting to be older than I was. Aging isn't like your dream to go to Paris, you get to sixteen, twenty-one, thirty eventually. It comes to you. NO MORE WAXING PHILOSOPHICAL.

I never really got the hang of chat rooms, but man did I love them. I would have these incredibly boring conversations about absolutely nothing. And then there would be PMing with what I pretended/thought was a near-aged boy about something mundane like how we both liked soccer. How much do you like soccer? A lot. Do you play on a team? Yes. It's fun. Gag me with a spork. I don't know what was so fascinating then, because I find chat rooms mindnumbing now.

Chat rooms have definitely fallen out of vogue, however. There's something less appealing about talking to random strangers with emoticons and sadly mangled English. We've moved on to talking to random strangers who have pictures, even if it's not really of the person you think you're talking to. But I think one thing remains true about both internet social networks and chat rooms: the point isn't the actual person. It's what I discovered when I was ten, the liberation of the changing persona, of being different people or even just different facets of yourself. One facet of myself is a fifteen-year-old girl who delivers zingers who people who refuse to use 'your mom' jokes correctly, and another is a 23-year-old maneater who's unintimidated and unimpressed by the internet attempts at picking her up.

Everyone's pretending a little bit, so don't try to mix the reality and the game. Here's my message to pre-teen and teenage girls: please stop posting your cell phone number, street address, etc. on public sites that anyone who can work email has access to. I hope yo mama didn't raise no fool.