In Which, Koko-Like, We Could Not Communicate Effectively

Meeting people from the internet is the oddest thing because it has never registered as an “Eh” experience for me. I have either met a person IRL and been THRILLED to finally SPEAK to this friend and see how their BLINKS and FINGERNAILS look, or I’ve felt catastrophically awkward and left the get-together knowing that I probably would have been better off confining that relationship to its office appliance of origin.

The good experiences are the easiest to talk about because duh, so obviously I’m not going to talk about those.

When I was sixteen years old I had a secret Myspace profile. I say secret because I went to a high school that was a lot like a country club, and being Girl Who Loves Reading was an adventure enough without also being Girl Who Loves the Internet. I kept my friends in the dark re: what I was doing on the computer outside of designing Sim houses, and in return they probably thought I played The Sims a lot more than I actually did.

Myspace was like a fantasy land in 2004 — one full of gifs and trolls and elaborate self-photography — and it was on a Myspace message board for the Flying Spaghetti Monster that I met a human that I’m going to refer to as Dan.

Dan was funny and pithy and had a screen name that didn’t prominently feature aLtErNaTiNg CaPs or the number 69. We were fast friends. He was one year older and went to a high school nearby, which was convenient considering I’d met him while discussing a globally-recognized pasta-based hobbycult. We IMed for a few months about Radiohead (the best) and Sum41 (the worst), and after a basic Google search confirmed that he was a Real Life Boy and not a pedophile dabbling in alternate religions, I agreed that he could come visit me at the record store where I worked and we’d go get lunch on my break.

This was huge. Not only was I not the dating kind at sixteen, but absolutely no high school-aged person was online dating in 2004. It was some sort of freakish double-negative and it landed me in a situation where I was suddenly trying to figure out whether to wear my “nice jeans” or keep it cool.

It was reflexive at this point to not tell anyone about it. Most of the people I knew hadn’t even heard of Myspace, let alone created an account and met a mystery boy and gone out to Taste of Asia to talk shop about CSS. The possibility of my being stabbed or abducted felt very real in a “this-is-exactly-what-they-warn-you-about-in-pamphlets” kind of way, but everything I had learned about the internet in my months of absorbing weebl and HomestarRunner had convinced me to push through it. Great people were everywhere! You just had to give them a chance!

We met in a parking lot on a cold November day with our respective arms crossed, and the first thing out of both of our mouths was, “Hey.” Then there was maybe ten years of silence. I spotted his car nearby, which he had told me was named Fred during a conversation on instant messenger, so I gave a half-smile and said, “Look! It’s Fred!”

Needless to say, the date did not go as planned. Instead of walking back to work with a takeout box and a smile on my face, I was left frantically attempting to delete all of the information I’d absorbed in the past hour. It wasn’t that he had been a bad person, because, Major Internet Rule Number One: Most of the People on There Are Totally Fine. It was that the rapport and back-and-forth we had textually simply didn’t exist face-to-face.

There were instances that would have been funny in theory, but fell flat on their stupid sixteen year old faces on the table in front of us. Like when I ordered the ‘Crab Bag’ off the menu and it didn’t get so much as a :). There were canyons of silence between our conversation topics, and when the bill came, we politely split it and parted ways. There was no talk of ever seeing each other again.

At the time it’d been disappointing, and privately so since I couldn’t tell anyone about this Secret Date without revealing my Secret Internet Life. It almost would have been better if he had been a dick, or a secret lizard, or something equally unexpected, but he was just himself. A nice white boy from Connecticut who liked to IM me and hear about my project for Journalism class. A boy who, as it turned out, I happened to not get along with.

Somehow the experience didn’t discourage me from meeting internet people altogether, though. In the years since then I’ve found a few of my best friends through the secret (and not-so-secret-anymore) places I hang out online. And at the end of the day was the feeling of Dan and I at that sad table splitting a Crab Bag mortifying? Perhaps. But who doesn’t go on a bad date in high school?

I think what resonates with me now is that Dan helped me learn Major Internet Rule Number Two: Sometimes Talking to People Can Be the Hardest Thing. Your Computer Can Help.