If this was AIM I would know what to title this.

I realized last night that I never sign into AIM anymore. The revelation came to me while I was chatting with an old friend – an old friend who I used to communicate with daily via AIM – using gmail chat. There is nothing wrong with gmail chat, of course, and we were chatting away as cheerfully and easily as we used to, but there was something sad about leaving AIM and that little yellow man who symbolized it behind. Sure, I don’t miss that obnoxious “door opening” noise, but there are other things.

AIM was a big chunk of my social life as an adolescent and young adult, as I wager it was for most people in my age bracket. It started in middle school when everyone had AOL as their internet provider (dating myself, again) and we all indulged in shy chat-room romances and petty instant message flirting. Instant messaging was revolutionary and liberating – crushes were discussed with reckless abandon without the threat of voices cracking and parents overhearing.

I was a little late to the party, as I am to most things, because my parents had an old computer and an even older phone line. When I finally got my own computer (purple I-Mac that I think that I’ve discussed here before – screw you I-Pad!) AIM was the first thing that I downloaded. Later, in college, AIM became a virtual lifeline. Those were the early days of my cell phone hatred – the pre-texting days – and I left my AIM up constantly. Because I lived in a series of small rooms and apartments, having my AIM window perpetually open meant that I was perpetually within hearing range of the little burble that announced a new message. I would eat dinner, study and nap with one ear open to my main social outlet.

I guess that feeling of social connectedness is the reason that I feel so nostalgic for AIM. Those were the days of constant chatting and bitchin’ away messages. (Really, I was a pro at away messages. I had hundreds of them and I often processed new information through an away message filter: what a hilarious fact or quote, perhaps a good away message? This is a level of creative preoccupation that I wish I could claim now.)

The beauty of AIM, at least for the antisocial masses, was its indirect quality. You could type something that you were afraid to say aloud; you could send someone a message without having to put on shoes. As an added bonus, you could usually tell if someone was around their computer (I used to have an away message that read “Working on a good idle”) and you could prep your message accordingly.

Sometimes you miss the glory days of the internet and on those days you can’t help but think that the only answer is posting something un-clever and biting on the FB profiles of people who profess a love for the medium. If you’ll excuse me, I’ll be posting “*Unlike!*” under the photos of my enemies until AIM becomes retro-cool.

Strolling

I think I am getting into the habit of writing these things right before I leave for work in the morning and therefore giving the impression that I am always either at work or thinking long, dreary thoughts about work. And that is not the case. I often think long dreary thought about a number of topics. Currently I am thinking a couple of long dreary thoughts about buying houses. (I don’t know if I have mentioned that we are considering buying a house on here yet; if not, surprise!) It’s a shocker to find that after years of looking at tiny one-storey houses that you feel oddly seduced by a two-storey house. Woe to the real estate agent that must conduct us to a 750 square-foot house and a 1,200 square-foot house in the same day.

But I am also thinking dreary thoughts about the feeling this morning when I opened my kitchen door to let the dog out. It was about 7:40 and cool out, but the coolness had a feeling of brevity – I could feel the insane hotness looming just beyond the shade. I felt it when I opened the bathroom window this morning and when I turned on the dusty fan last night. Summer is coming in all of its sweaty, grimy, glory. And when it gets here I’m going to take off my sneakers and be cranky until it retreats.

I was thinking about summer the other day when I was sitting in my car on my lunch break. It was windy outside, but warm enough in the car and after I’d eaten my lunch I felt like taking a nap. To distract myself I watched the cars and the people trouping past my windshield. First, there were a whole lot of them (both people and cars) and they all seemed so shiny in the sun – hubcaps and steel bumpers were reflecting the glare off of reflective plastic strollers, bug-eye sunglasses, and embellished flip-flops.

It wasn’t like the many lunch breaks that I spent in my car during the winter. Since I’ve been working retail the weather has been mostly daunting; people fled from their cars to the Baby Gap overhang with newspapers and purses held over their heads. Watches were checked, lunch hours were maximized and people kept their plump calves and boney feet concealed in weather-appropriate clothing.

But last week people weren’t just shopping, they were making a g.d. day of it. They were strolling and worse yet, they were strolling with strollers. I remembered, idly, that when I was a young teenager my friends and I used to convince our parents to drop us off at the outlet mall for the sheer change of scenery. We would wander, penniless, from place to place admiring toe-socks and platform sandals. Sometimes we pooled our money and bought matching Sailor Moon shoelaces.

In light of this, I’m pretty sure that it is going to be a real ugly summer.

No grab-ass, college boy.

The title of this blog has very little to do with the content, even in the abstract fashion that anything in this blog manages to relate to anything along the borders/sidebar. Some guy said it in the movie that I watched last night (They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?) and it was the only thing that made me giggle during a 2-hour tour of bug-eyed women and sailors in short shorts having heart attacks. The whole thing convinced me that my life is just an endless dance marathon of doom and that if someone rips your last silk stocking you should ask them to shoot you with a petite handgun and, provided they are a gentleman, they will oblige you.

Unfortunately, the above rant pretty well summarizes my feelings on the film, and as that paragraph is a fairly crummy blog even by my (admittedly slack) standards, we’ll have to leave the topic and continue onward.

Everyone who is anyone knows that I’m obsessed with email. When my main squeeze and I returned from our vacation last night we both crouched in front of the computer for an emergency email evaluation. We aren’t much into taking turns, so together we scrolled though my mess of job-site spam and Facebook comments, and then sorted through his digital pile of Amazon ads and real estate correspondence. Nothing was determined to be pressing, and we left the usual junk to be dealt with individually. Now, you could argue that the real estate stuff pertained to me and that the Facebook comments that I receive are often directed at my FB-free pal. But, however I phrase it, we still checked our email together. And that’s a little freaky.

There are a couple of truths that I learned from reading lady magazines that I hold to be completely self evident. One is that you shouldn’t steal anything that someone might recognize (a boyfriend, a hair style, a hundred dollar bill) from your lady friends. The second is that checking someone else’s email means that you are a super scumbag. This motto extends to cell-phone messages, instant message records and works for family and friends, but especially for gf/bf combos. I frequently tell my main squeeze (never an offender of this rule) that reading your spouse’s email means that you are a sleazebag and will eventually get a divorce.

I’m not trying to be a stickler, completely. Obviously I discuss the contents of my email with just about who will listen and especially with my spousal person. And I see the temptation of checking on someone’s email and the ways that you could write it off as your computer/your property/complete honesty ect. But I do think that having private routes of communication are important.

Here’s another angle. Our house is full of notebooks and none of them are joint-custody. When one party encounters a notebook that doesn’t belong to them, they politely decline reading it. This means seeing temptation and having to move the temptation from the kitchen table before you can sit down to enjoy your meal. This strife is particularly keen for my husband, since I have a bad habit of seizing the back of a grocery list or receipt in the drive-thru to record my sudden whims and feelings. Spousal person reported last week picking up a seemingly empty stack of sticky notes only to find on note 3 the beginning of an impassioned rant of mine from the summer of 2007. I’m not a very discrete person.

Is the whole point here that people curb their commutations to fit a certain audience? Or is it that people know when they look into something that wasn’t intended for them that they will find something that they don’t want to find? To be vaguer yet and more melodramatic, nosiness can seem almost self destructive.

I don’t know really. Mainly I was just thinking about the weirdness of joint [email] checking, private journals in plain sight and life being an evil dance party of horse-themed doom. That’s it, I guess. I don’t have much more to say on the topic – thought when I envisioned writing this while showering this morning it was a lot more poignant.

Friar-Tucking around

This post is on posture and it won’t be amazing or uplifting because posture, like all other things, is shitty. That’s my POV today and I won’t take any flak for it, or for my use of obnoxious abbreviations to communicate “point of view.”

You may notice that I frequently describe my actions here as “hunching around.” That is because I have terrible, slouching posture and I tend to hunch over with the least provocation – tiny keyboard, little hatchback, boring book with small print or a candy bar dropped below my desk. Hunching is bad for you, in that it doesn’t shape your spine in the way your spine wants to be shaped, but it is also natural. I don’t see well, so I naturally bend at my mid-spine too scope out the interesting developments on my computer screen.

So I’ve been thinking about trying to improve my posture, first because it would make me seem a little less like Friar Tuck, but also because good posture makes people want to give you jobs. Posture makes people trust you more quickly than having a Golden Retriever.

But I feel that there is an alternate stigma against having good posture, as though good posture is indicative of being a real WASP-y son-of-a-bitch. I was reading a story by Dorothy Parker last night and the frigid woman in it lives in envy of her richer friend and has cocktails with her to flatter her into giving gifts. Anyway, this frigid, poor lady with the bad clothes and the pug-face had good posture and sat without her back touching the chair.

Well, with one slur against Golden Retrievers, another against WASPs and a final blow against the pug-faced populace, I consider my work here done. Oh, Thursday.