Deliver us from the evil web

I live in fear and am increasingly obsessed with the dangers of e-mails, text messages and more generally all “real time” asynchronous typed communication tools. I now take Beta Blockers to find the strength to click on “send” for my major formal e-mails. I am not crazy (or very little): I just have witnessed many terrible stories due to unruly clicks and am aware that each e-mail is a potential nuclear bomb. E-mail interfaces are filled with "f*ck up your career", “ruin your relationship”, “lose your best friend”, “sabotage the NASDAQ”, “piss off Mommie dearest” or “sound weird forever” buttons. If you don't believe that e-mails are plotting to ruin your life: here are a few selected examples (don't hesitate to send me others... I have to feed my phobia). An ex of mine “replied all” to an invitation to an engagement party, thinking he was sending a message to his best friend only, saying “Poor Andrew if he knew she is such a whore…she cheated on him all through college”. He actually ended up being invited to the wedding, did not show up but sent a nice gift…needless to say they never spoke again. I met someone who lost his job after having sent an insulting message about a client of his company to the client itself… security walked him out that day and he lost his visa that month. A guy, in a major DC institution, got mixed up between his opened windows and pasted his gay chat room reply in an e-mail to colleagues making the entire place aware of his sexual position preferences. E-mail clients such as Outlook or Lotus Notes now fill the recipient field for you when you type in the first few letters of an email address or a recipient's name duplicating the probability to make a mistake. Oops, too late …once you've clicked on the send button, you can still try a pathetic “PLEASE IGNORE/DELETE PREVIOUS E_MAIL” but it will just motivate the recipient to open your correspondence faster. There is no backing out and depending on the seriousness of the situation you can either pack your bag, shoot the recipient in the head or run directly to the airport. At best this is: “so you revealed your Coke addiction to your entire company? What do you do now?”, but it could very well be worse than that. Not only can you send your message to the wrong recipient but you also can send the wrong answer to right recipient. E-mail correspondence is easy to store and dispatch and the cyberspace is infested with evil spirits (like FHC himself, I admit) who will not hesitate to publish old e-mails when necessary (Peter R. slapped my wrist badly in July). Btw, the number one rule is that your ex-boyfriend always ends up getting your e-mail password and the revenge factor always weighs in. Another common mistake is to forget that at the bottom of the chain of e-mails you forward there might be an original e-mail the current recipient should not see. You should never write anything to anyone you don’t want to be published nationwide a bit like you should never let your boyfriend, or anybody for that matter take a naked picture of yourself if you plan to run for Governor one day. Even instant messenger conversations can be saved and even truth in an e-mail can have side-effects. I predict that in your lifetime you will be humiliated, nabbed by the feds, divorced, fired, charged, beaten up, left or sued - because of an e-mail. My paranoia (or my lucidity) becomes quite handicapping. I pre-type everything in Word Documents, read my e-mails twenty times before sending them and sometimes delay sending anything important correspondence for weeks. I am conscious that when I click on “send”, my life dissolves into a flux of electric waves running around the web and deciding my destiny and I know that in the end I cannot win every single e-mail battle I fight.

After what was a horrible week, correlated to the amount I drank last weekend following the equation I elaborated in a previous entry this month, I have taken a plane ticket to join LL in NYC. I felt like a lost puppy these last two weeks and am very excited to see LL studying hard and being all New Yorkee. Yet I am a bit worried with the size of LL’s new apartment: spending a week end in a closet in Chelsea seems really ironic.

In blogorama these days there is not much: I have been wandering in music blogs looking for gay music without much success: here is a link but if you have any other suggestions I would appreciate. Alex A. teaches us to clean our friends list once in a while and I think that's healthy. An angry brazilian wrote a little something about me (well I had to delete the link, the picture is not flattering), this is heartfelt and I could mention that for my second appearance in someone’s blog, I had wished something nicer than "balding faggot" but some would argue this is quite fair-play and I will refer to my Oscar W.'s quote of yesterday.

Thank you for your patronage.

Comments

[Chris]

If you're looking for a gay song, this one is tbe best - it won the Eurovision song contest this year (as I'm sure you know) and it was played on repeat in all the clubs in Turkey when I visited:

http://www.klarnet.net/helena_paparizou--my_number_one_(eurovision_2005)_free_mp3_downloads.htm

(and yes, the foam at Halikarnas did ruin my white sneakers)