I Guess "How To Be An Asshole" Wasn't a Course Requirement for My Major...

...and yet so many people seem to be schooled on the subject.

Maybe it's what I get for trying to meet people on-line and foolishly thinking that real friendships can develop via a medium that sustains itself on the paradox of fostering human connection through social detachment and cybertronic anonymity. When your friends-list on MySpace is larger than the group of people you actually know and with whom you interact, I'd say there's a problem with the way that we perceive people; as if they're little more than summations of a few photographs and a profile neatly condensed into a clickable icon that comes complete with a handy deletion option, just in case. (Incidentally, when it comes to the creation of an internet profile, it's amazing how concepts such as "character," "honesty," and "trust" can become lost in translation. No one's going to write "I love meeting new people, though because I'm a schizophrenic sociopath, I suppose you could say I am other people" in a description of themselves.) In a commodification culture that thrives on the ease of instant gratification, the internet has made it all too simple to equate meeting people to shopping, or ordering from a menu. When did we get the idea that it's ok to take people out for a test-drive? It's so...convenient, providing the illusion of speed and facility. Even the word "photograph" has been condensed into the monosyllabic singularity of "Pic."

And there's the rub: Convenience. Is it truly possible to build a mutually genuine friendship upon the base of a medium whose primary concern is merely convenience?

I have to wonder if we classify people in our minds according to the ways we meet them. If we meet a person through MySpace or Friendster, do we tag that person in our personal conscience as "My MySpace Friend" or "My Friendster Friend," and if so, do we allow that to affect the way we treat him? Do we let ourselves remain detached just enough because we met someone through a computer, believing the things we do won't have any personal or emotional consequences because we filter our perceptions of that person through the myopic lens of the profile that captured our caprice to begin with? Is there a default in our minds to which we refrain that tells us no matter how many personal interactions or meaningful conversations we have with people we meet on-line, these people are simply "our on-line friends," thusly placating our consciences when we don't actively make time for them in our lives? It sometimes seems as if we think that no matter how thoughtless or unmindful we are of people we meet on-line (oh, say, telling someone you'd be glad to get together with him over the weekend and just happen to forget to call him to make it happen), so long as they remain on the friends-list, everything's alright.

The concept of the "friends-list" itself is still strange to me, as I've never felt the need to systematize the people I know according to the genus and the species of their friendship. Perhaps it taps into some adolescent need for popularity and acceptance that never goes away, as if we plan to show our friends-list to the world from which we disconnect and say "Look at all the people I know! And look at all the people who know me!" It's as if we're trying to be popular in the privacy of our own homes.

While there's no all-encompassing diagnosis, or general rule that applies to everyone who has ever met anyone on-line, my personal experience has left me disdainful of this particular communicative mode. It's no great revelation that more often than not people can pretend to be anyone and anything they wish while hidden behind the mask of a monitor, and, when coupled with the pathology of detachment mentioned above, it would seem to me that these are the people about whom we should worry the most: the ones who spend their days, and go to great lengths, to pretend to be one thing while ultimately being another. They appear normal (or at least, not abnormal), and interested in getting to know you, and for a while, you seem to be developing a friendship. Then it happens. They dissappear, without so much as a warning, or if there is one, it's merely a subtle nuance that can only be found in retrospect. No more IMs, in spite of the fact that for weeks beforehand you would talk to each other on a daily basis, no more phone calls, no more plans to get together, and any communication that is had before they Houdini on you is but a distant and stilted memory of its former infatuation.

What? What kind of emotionally broken, awkwardly Freudian, "my-daddy-didn't-hug-me" issues does a person have to have to be like this? It certainly raises a host of questions, all of which are in vain. Do they do it on purpose? Do these people really make a conscious effort to secure the invested interest of another person for the sake of getting off on the validation it gives them when they pull their disappearing act? Was their supposedly existent interest in you ever real? You don't just wake up one day and stop being interested in another person, unless all that came before was simply empty rhetoric and fabricated feelings used in the construction of a ruse that masks a person's incapability to handle the awkward situation of telling a person you simply aren't interested. Is it me? Did I do something wrong? Was it too much too soon? Are they simply afraid to get too close?

Am I even describing this breed of bastardry adequately enough to convey the anxiety on which they feed? The most nefarious ploy in their game of guile is that they simply don't care -- or if they do, their actions convey the antithesis -- and because of this, whenever you try and broach the subject of their absence, you wind up looking like the crazy one because you can't help but have an emotional reaction to their apparent apathy.

Or maybe my lonliness in this city has made me desperate, and I attach too quickly to similar personalities. (Something I've never seen in myself before, so I'm going to put it in the "maybe" pile).

But the truth is, I liked the guy. I met him through Friendster, and our personalities clicked. Since the beginning of April we would talk, quite literally, every day. He'd IM me often, and we'd talk for hours. We met at Cafe Guttenberg, and what was supposed to be a brief meeting for coffee turned into a four-hour dinner of talking and getting to know one another. I brought him cookies on my day off simply because we had joked about it the night before. We'd bond over shoe shopping for God's sake.

He invited me out with his friends on several occassions, and other times simply to keep him company while he packed up his things to move to a new apartment downtown. After deciding that I was really coming to care for this person, I went in search of a housewarming gift, ultimately deciding on a signed copy of a book published by his favorite architect. (Mad props to me and how awesomely thoughtful I am). He said he loved it, and made with the hugs.

So why did he lie to me? After the gift-giving, he said he'd call me to see what was going on later in the week, which never happened. He talked to me briefly on AIM, and spoke as though we'd hang out over the weekend, and when I casually asked him to let me know what was going on, he replied with "You know I most certainly will."

Which he most certainly didn't. That sunday afternoon, I sent him an IM, to which his responses seemed distracted at best, and inquired as to what he had done over the weekend. While his response was that he hadn't done much of anything and just relaxed on saturday night, the comments on his MySpace told quite the different story of a group get-together, exclusive of yours truly.

So why lie? It's not that I'm bothered by not seeing him over the weekend (or maybe I am because I won't admit to myself I've come to have feelings for him that transcend the platonic boundaries of friendship), and I'm not so needy as to be the kind of person to keep tabs on him or monopolize his time. I just can't wrap my mind around why a person so seemingly invested in getting to know me would talk to me as though we were meeting up over the weekend, not make good on the assumption it implies, and then lie to me about his excursions. Why act avoidant when there's been no prior indication of emotional problems? Was he talking all the while to other people online, treating me as simply a serving from a buffet? Why has this been followed by days of zero communication, and how in God's name do you approach the subject in the first place? "Hi, so, why'd you lie? You said you'd call me, but you didn't, then lied to me, but I read your MySpace and this is what it said." I'm not a 14 year old with a vagina.

I'm telling myself that it's all in my head, and that it's certainly not all about me, but my over-analytic intuition can't help but wonder about this sudden subtle nuance and the changes it implies. Was my gift too much, or too soon? Did it convey some sense of desperation or desire contrary to what I had intended? Does he simply like me and he just can't process it? Futile questions, with answers only found in an awkward situation that requires a leap of faith in broaching the subject, which can't be done without seeming accusative and crazy.

And yet, I know that that's the right thing to do; to be honest with my emotions, and myself, regardless of his reactions and the consequences they'd entail. I suppose if he isn't emotionally developed enough and incapable of responding without condemning the potential of our friendship altogether, then he's nobody I need to know. It's simply difficult finding the words and the wisdom to approach the matter after an awkward period of not speaking, which I know must take a conscious effort to do. I'm simply afraid of losing yet another friend to the illusion of the internet.

And even more of having fallen for it.