Stumbling Into February

A writer I know once suggested that adulthood can be gauged by exactly how much of one's personal morals and ethics are compromised. The higher the compromise, the greater the adulthood. I like that sentiment, and of course by saying I like it, I mean I loathe its truth.

A hundred years of school later, I find that my bubble of life, the free-thinking freelance journalist, is in mid-burst. I am now doing marketing for a firm I dislike that practices a certain branch of law I cannot stand. And I can be proud now. At 27 and 2 months, I have achieved adulthood. All I need to do now is start selling jewelry, pump out some offspring and practice a plastic but inpenatrable (sp?) smile and I will be set for life. And by saying life, I mean a living death.

Not writing articles seems to have slowed down my inquisitive nature, as well, as my adventures in Second Life have slowed to a crawl. Also, each improvement to the viewer makes my own computer a little bit more obsolete each time, so now I'm crashing more than Mickey Rourke's career in the 1990s. I am getting on long enough to check out, say, the gallery of Jenn Villota (you'll have to find her on your own, which you can through google or flickr). Jenn's work is brutal, bloody and sex-charged. I find, the worse the economy here in Writerville gets, the more I find I like Jenn's work.

I say it's bad, but it's not sooo bad. One cannot become a freelance journalist and then count on the next story to buy one's dinner. The next story should, instead, buy the dinner you plan to have in a year. And that's where I am at present.

I haven't seen much of Clifford lately. After a bit of interest, he fell into the role of Paranoid Guy and was convinced I was out to get him. After talking him down, I found myself a bit too exhausted to persue any e-lationship with him. If I am going to be someone's mother in-world, I will go to one of the adoption agencies.

Not that the other guys I run into are much better. There's one who keeps IMing me when I am offline to ask if he can collar me. I keep writing back, 'does that mean you'll give me what a good captive should have? Place to live? Clothes? Amusement?' He does not reply to that. I'm hardly going to be online just to be the pole greaser for a fuckstick with no responsibility.

Eh, I'm babbling now. What? You knew that? Well, of course you did. Thanks for listening...

The Laughing Man

So I hang out with this boy. I'll call him Clifford.

He is plagued with feelings on inadequacy. He carries a pall of sadness around like a cloak. He knows big, honkin' words. So we get along quite well. Plus, he's pleased to see me, which is a nice little bonus.

We met in a 'sex' sim, where I was testing out my new dress. It's a daft little ritual I go through; I buy a dress and then see how appealing it is by going to a sex sim and seeing how many boys and girls are drawn to me. If they are obviously talking to someone else and stop their conversation to chat me up, I know I've got a good dress. Clifford was chatting up another girl, and it was going very poorly for him. Not that the girl wasn't appreciative or interested, but the broken English made it almost impossible to make out what she was trying to convey. I teleported him to a ballroom and forced him to dance with me. "You're too much!" he said at the time, but he was content to go along for the ride. I liked that, too.

It was Clifford who I mentioned in a prior blog - the public fellow who shouldn't be found wandering sex sims. And it was Clifford who I advised about this, and it was Clifford who was quite shocked by my investigatory skills. And it was Clifford who now IMs me when I'm not online just to say hello.

Clifford and I are like people who meet on the train, both heading to distant and different destinations, who get along like a house on fire. I think he's brilliant; he thinks I'm funny. That can go a long way. Second Life does definitely help pare down the small talk and get on with the business at hand (you can't just type 'um' or leave pregnant pauses all the time or else you risk the other person getting bored - such is Generation A.D.D.). The only problem is that, although you can share great laughs and profound statements, you cannot prove a lick of them. Some of the people I follow deride those who put up a wall between RL and SL; I can certainly respect that, in some ways envy that, but I *have* to keep a wall up. If I went into why, most people would understand, but then I would have breached my own levee, so to speak.

Anyway, I just wanted to write a little bit about Clifford, the man who finds me funny in this short part of our long journeys.

Cartoon in the Louvre

Things are things, there's no doubt about it. And things in moderation are usually alright. Things to the extreme are usually harmful, or, in a worst-case scenario, really stupid.

The stupidest thing I've come across lately is the painful need of people to talk in absolutes. Examples abound in your own head, I would guess, but let me illustrate some fine examples: "omgz that's the best!!", "I feel you completely!!", "you're the best!", "I have the best friends!", "This weekend was perfect!"

I know you've heard things like this, cuz, you know, UR THE BEST. Proclamation without elaboration. A cartoon in the Louvre.

A statement that says, 'please like me because I am making a definitive effort to make it sound like I like you!', or in the alternative, 'please see how gregarious, happy and peace-filled that I am!' Where we may part company is that, when I hear something like this, I automatically and without reservation think it's bullshit. Like the bloke you don't know who insists on puncuating his speech with 'trust me', it's used-carsalesman philosophy. Say it enough and it must be true.

Admittedly, some of my negative feelings about this absolutism is that I am unable to do it. I can't get away with latex boots in real life, so it is my natural inclination to dislike latex boots. I also can't get away with Burberry scarves and... well, the list goes on. But I digress. I find myself absolutely unable to absolutely think anything is the best. Even when I look at myself, I can only consider myself the best I can be at the moment - there's always room for exploration, development and maturity. The world is almost infinite with possibility and promise; to label something the best would bring any journey to an end.

And I'm afraid I just don't want to end any journey just yet. Why are so many people so anxious to?

On a related note, I'm not all that fond of people who send me emails asking me questions and ending with 'thanks', as if I've done what they've asked already. In fact, in my journo-world, 'thanks' does not mean thanks at all anymore; it rather means 'I'm ending my email now.' Does that make sense? Thanks.

SL / RL Parallel

Whether used as escapism or exploration, Second Life proves that old addage from that terrible movie 'The Adventures of Buckaroo Bonzai': wherever you go, there you are.

While continuing my Never-Ending Aimless Tour, in which I plonk a random word in SL's search engine and go wherever it tells me, I met a nice guy. Good attention to his clothes and appearance (even the eyes appeared to be the result of shopping, not stumbling a box of free eyes in the middle of a cornfield). An astute sense of humour - including fairly enjoyable bad-joke exchanges regarding angles (involving "obtuse questions" and "acute avatar" - groannn) and actuarials being the only people on Earth who could make accounting interesting to the regular world. A willingness to be lured away from a couple of stumbling noobs for a short dance with no chance of it going further than that.

And my first thought, as it is in RL, is: OK, what's wrong with this guy?

UPDATE -- I later found this fellow in real life - the hows and whys I will not go into. My journalistic instinct suggested I keep the information to myself. However, my personal instinct won out and I contacted him and told him how I found him, etc. Because he has a public position with authority, I advised him to get a different avatar if he wanted to pursue personal relationships (as he had intimated). He was a bit shocked by this revelation, and I admit to being a little concerned over how he would handle it. By the end of our chat, he appeared willing to consider a second avatar - one that would have no contact with his main one. I felt dead awful for scaring him like that, but better me than an associate of his.

Dear Members of BLOODLINE

Dear members of BLOODLINE:

Like a virtual version of HIV, you have entered and spread through Second Life. Like HIV, you contanimate and offer nothing in return. Like HIV, much of your behaviour can be linked to assholes. Like HIV, life is better without you.

When I show up at a ballroom, I don't want to see a dropdown menu asking if you can bite me. When I go shopping, I don't want to see a dropdown menu asking if you can bite me. If I'm at a coffee shop with mates, I don't want to see a dropdown menu asking if you can bite me. You get the idea, yeh?

And when I get a dropdown and you ask me if you can bite me and I say, "Sure! Can I shit in your mouth?", don't cop an attitude. It's you invading my space and interrupting my time that inspired my retort. I am just as short if someone would ask me for my shoes or ask if they can put a tattoo on me for their own benefit (and, in effect, you do, as the only thing a victim can get is a crappy looking pair of holes to wear on one's neck).

Whatever you get from going around "on the hunt", as you lamely put it, I suspect it's only marginally more than what your victims get. You "own" 500 souls? Whoopie mother fucking doo, mate.

And if you accuse me of "being young", as Whatevah Antfarm did, and your boyfriend decides to orbit me when I refuse to be bitten, as Wandering Antfarm did, you transcend stupid and go directly to retarded. You get reported, fucktards. Now you'll have something else to tally up that's meaningless.

In short, please, please, for the love of God, fuck yourselves.

Best,

Madelyn

RL and SL: Escapism or Extension?

In some ways, Second Life is a simple form of escapism, a way to explore one's more adventurous or dark corners - at least that's the more accepted psychology behind it. I suspect at times that, instead of escapism, SL actually commands one to be oneself - only to the nth degree, as if the virtual world lends license to make oneself into a caricature of oneself. A 3-D parody, if you will.

I would be hesitant to completely dismiss the 'escapism' theory, but I would put forward that escapism blends too easily with rationalization.

I have a good mate on SL called Beth who, in real life ("RL"), is seeing a married bloke and has been seeing him for several years. The two of them share anniversaries and money, like a real couple, only without the 'real' or the 'couple' bits. In RL, her man often begs off seeing her, as he has a real family to attend to. As in any relationship borne out of deception, there are trust issues galore. Is he seeing someone else? Will he find someone new? Is he telling the truth? As a veteran of that kind of arrangement, I know you can't get past trust issues. If the foundation of a relationship is a betrayal, then one can hardly hope for anything not tainted by some sort of distortion.

Beth and her man are on SL as well. They owned a club for a while, even (his idea, her money - which seems to be a trend). I visited there once at the behest of another girl, Candy, who was a dancer there. Beth's man, who was also present, almost immediately instant-messaged me, hoping he and I could spend some, ahem, quality time together.

Months later, Beth and I had a cup of virtual coffee and she told me she was concerned about her man seeing someone else behind her back. I was sympathetic, as she was quite upset, but I really just wanted to shake her and say, 'what do you expect, really?' Beth is a sweet girl and a kind soul, but somewhere along the way, she found it acceptable to be The Other Woman. Her bid to the The Main Woman in SL doesn't seem to have been too successful. Anyway, she asked for my help, and I suggested I simply talk to her man and see if he makes a move, and then take pictures of whatever followed. She didn't go for that - she didn't want to anger him. I think, rather, she didn't want it proven that she's dating a jerk. No girl does, really, certainly if such a revelation would involve witnesses.

Beth wanted me to chat up this mysterious other woman, and I agreed. I went to her island, or sim, but never saw her apart from a guy who Beth suspected was an alternative avatar of her man. Bit complicated, eh? So I haven't talked to the woman - and am unsure if I will. The cuts in RL have bled into SL, and there's little relief I could offer.

And then I look at me. How much is my SL persona just a continuation, or cartoon, of my real self? And how do I like being my own parody?