The Icy Dildo: or, My Imaginary Internet Friend

I have a blog crush. This is not so strange, as I have had or still have a blog crush on all, like, four of you who will read this post. But this one, it goes beyond. It's not just that I ardently wish to be 1/10th as funny sometimes as is everything that comes outta her, er, mouth, typewriter, whatever, or that she has nice cheekbones in the pictures of her you occasionally can find. Or even the fact that she uses the word "ballsac" or the phrase "pumpkins full of owl shit."

What it is that's really put me over the edge is that I found out, by reading her archives obsessively is how I found out, that not only is her birthday the same week as mine, but we graduated high school the same year. Since that time, I've attended college and graduate school, which I still attend albeit RELUCTANTLY, and my writing has gotten for me the modest favor of two eensy weensy publications in periodicals with circulations the size of the staff at my dentist's office. Since that time, she's attended college, interviewed famous bands, had a career, and her writing has gotten her not only fired, but also interviewed in The New York Times, Good Morning America, and a lot of other major national forums. And her readership is apparently the size of the entire democratic party in this state, fifty or sixty or TEN-THOUSAND times over.

So. It's like she's ME. ONLY BLONDE. AND WITH CHEEKBONES. AND SOUTHERN. AND MORMON. AND A GRAPHIC DESIGNER. AND REALLY REALLY FAMOUS. But like me, nevertheless: WE WERE BORN IN THE SAME MONTH.* When EMF released their seminal album, the one with "You're Unbelievable," we were BOTH sophomores in high school. THAT HAS TO COUNT FOR SOMETHING!

Normally, instead of going all capital about it on my blog, I'd probably send her an e-mail that says "YOU PROBABLY HEAR THIS ALL THE TIME BUT YOUR BLOG IS AWESOME!" However, I'm reluctant to do so, and that's because last time I initiated e-mail correspondence with a blogger, she wrote back to me and we had an entertaining and rewarding friendship for almost two years.

Then, I learned that she didn't exist.

I first clicked on this blogger, when I saw her mentioned here, because she had the same name as I. My name is weird, and if you do ever see it it's on a boy, so I was interested to discover a technically-literate young drama queen of the same name, with a knack for writing a blog. Drama. In the two years I spent with her, not only did she do her boss, get a new job, visit her birth mother, and take in her cousin's pregnant ex-girlfriend, she also got engaged to and unengaged from a woman. By the end of the blog, it was all drama and steamy, graphic depictions of lesbian sex.

But what I thought was, she was writing a memoir in front of us, and maybe making some stuff up. Because she existed. Oh yes. There were pictures of her on her blog, a pretty but not stunning young woman in the very locales she described, and pictures too of all her supporting characters, like Adopted Sister and Former Best Friend and Spanish Go-Go Dancer. When the blogger got a haircut, she posted supporting pictures of herself with the new haircut. Ditto when she gained weight.

This is a long and sordid story I guess I don't feel like getting into as much as I thought, when I began this post, that I felt like getting into it. Suffice it to say, I have 60+ e-mails from this woman, still, in my overstuffed inbox. (Really. I just counted.) In these e-mails, she elaborates on and offers further insight into her relationships with various family members and partners mentioned on the blog. She gives me a pep talk about first moving in with K., she reveals that she searched for and found and read a story of mine on the web. She gives me advice about buying a Volkswagen, and she has a long argument with me about pornography and to what extent it exploits women. (In case you're wondering, I was the one who was like, well, don't women watch porn too? It doesn't have to be seen as ALL exploitative, right? And she was all like "my viewpoint is sociobiological" and "in my experience with the ladies on the field hockey team...") She knew my household well enough to ask relevant questions like, "how's the masturbating dog?"

For example, here's an e-mail in which she elaborates on why she keeps her dildo in the freezer:

You never tried it before? Omigod girl, you don't
know what you're missing! Take it out of the freezer
right before a long hot bath, then afterward retire to
the boudoir and mmmmm!

A year ago, she took her site down again and replaced it with a Polish error message. Similar stunts had happened before, and she always reincarnated a few days later with more tales of drama. This time, however, a discussion got started in her absence here, and that was that. By about halfway through this interminable comment thread, the amateur sleuths of the blogworld had pretty irrevocably shown: this chick, she was a hoax, perpetrated by a middle-aged man with a wife and kids.

A MIDDLE AGED MAN. GAVE ME ADVICE ABOUT FREEZING DILDOS. My god, was this something he heard about from someone else? Or was it something he MADE UP just to see if I would DO it? (I never did. And yes, he knew what I looked like 'cause I sent a little picture to give my correspondent a face since I'd seen so many of "her." I am totally gullible.)

I had a pretty hard time with this at first. What got me was mainly how ELABORATE this hoax was. Not only was this a regularly-updated blog with long, rich entries, BUT ALSO the "girl blogger" had full-fledged e-mail relationships with me AND A BUNCHA OTHER PEOPLE. "She" commented regularly on a bunch of other blogs, and even IM'd with a lot of people.

This guy had to have spent, like four or five hours a day EVERY DAY "being" this girl. TOTALLY. WEIRD. I also felt -- and still feel, I have to admit -- kind of mad about the emails. That "she" let me believe we were... discussing our personal lives. Equitably. It was worse for other people: the "blogger" had been "raped in Mexico," went the story line, so a lot of readers had e-mailed her with their own most private violations. I had nothing like that, but it's still totally weird.

Like this one time we had a fight. I remember I went running after we had the fight. I remember my feet pounding into the twisted ground, pounding out all the bad feelings about why, why, why, no matter how kindly you tried to be, could you not express your reservations about someone else's beliefs without it being all like you are trying to wound THAT PERSON? Rather than to offer an alternative? Or at least, to express a differing viewpoint?

But I had a fight with a person who didn't exist. It was all in my head. If that's not a spur to Buddhism, I don't know what is.

And what to make of THIS?

This really feels like
girltalk to me. Boys tend to send me these regimented
call-and-response type emails, quoting and everything,
and sometimes I try to play along but not lately
anymore, I just save it for work. So I probably sound
retarded all the time now, instead of just most of the
time.

But here's a strange thing. I "faked" in my e-mails to "her," too, because I thought she was more "naive" and "girly," than me. So I did the enthusiastic "OH, THAT'S SO WEIRD" thing or whatever, "practicing" my "empathy" skills.

So I was doing a mild version of the same thing I'm still kinda mad at him for doing. And aren't we all doing this, all the time?

So. I have to admit I admired the guy, what he'd pulled off, and I felt a tiny bit "proud" to be part of it. The native informant. Like the time I sent an e-mail ruminating on domesticity and the very next day, to document domesticity, he posted a picture of the Go Go dancer peeling potatoes. And I don't believe that he was MERELY taking advantage of all who wrote to him. Here's from an e-mail I got after it had all come out. I sent him an e-mail, addressed finally to HIM, where I was like, wow, totally weird that you did this.

[T]hat's what I've been missing all these years -- the
friends I made without really making them, and all the
genuine interactions we could've had.

Take you, for example. Do you know how hard it was to
pass up that common ground? I live in a world where
people have MBAs not MFAs, and reading means the WSJ
or whatever you bought at the airport, and writing is
just a commoditized skill that results in productized
content. Now you tell me you're contemplating the
same choice I did, novel or dissertation. That's too
funny or something.

Yeah. Only then he never wrote me again. See what good friends we were? And this post has also got me thinking about an accusation by another former friend, about how I am "bad" at relationships "with women." I was like, how dare you extrapolate from my relationship with YOU to my relationship with ALL WOMEN? Still. I'm sensitive about it. I can't even tell a real woman from a man faking a woman. And when I DO have a best-friend woman with an actual, documentable vagina, we piss the hell out of each other because I have a very small tolerance for obligatory compliments. I love compliments... it's just the OBLIGATORY ones I hate. Also, don't make fun of the college I went to. Or if you do, don't expect me to like it. Also, I don't want to share my deodorant with you and I don't want to cover your shifts at work.

Obviously, I need a boot camp about How to Love Women, beause clearly men and their evil, evil culture have trained me to HATE women.

Anyhow, this is why I'm reluctant to write to bloggers. Heather Armstrong, I don't believe she exists. You can say to me, there are the pictures! There is the blog of her husband! There is her Flickr site! There is the New York Times section with the picture of her baby on the front! And I will say to you, Yes. Isn't this "Heather Armstrong" rather overdetermined? Are we not INUNDATED with reasons to reasons to believe in her existence, reasons PERFECTLY CALCULATED to weaken our defenses? Against what future invasion, I ask you.

So I will continue my crush from afar. For now.




*Different years, sure, but, you know, THE SAME MONTH.