In the days that I first knew Matthew, back in the disillusioned haze of high school, he was good friends with Markus, who lived nearby. I would occasionally stay with Matthew's parents, who were by far the most intelligently daunting twosome I'd ever encountered up until that point in my life. Both of Matthew's parents worked at the nearby university; his father as a professor and his mother in some forever-undefined-to-me role in the foreign studies department. Markus, one of Matthew's closer friends, lived nearby. I had met him, but had never been introduced to his ...

I have this half-finished entry sitting in another window of my text editor. I'd planned to tell you all about the lovely, yet still somewhat hush-hush, project I'm working on for dragon*con. It was pretty prose, prettily arranged. I might even use it, in another form, on another day.

However, I must interrupt this momentary rhapsodization to remind my five members of the listening public of this glaringly obvious fact: IM trollers, if I cared, would really, really annoy me.

Perhaps, as said to Colter, I did get up on the bitchy side of the bed this morning. Blame it a misbehaving Gallery install - no. I'm not playing that game. I blame the inane conversation provided to me by the person who can't even find the time for a two-second check of the profile of the person he's pestering.

"Utterly meaningless!

Everything is meaningless!"

Ecclesiastes 1:2

While most people are amazed at the sheer volume of attempted pickups I see through instant messenging systems, I'm not. Matthew describes it as being like telemarketing; men target a specific demographic over and over because someone, out there, is biting.

Hey, baby, let's check me out. According to yahoo, this is me:

Nickname: domesticat (meow.)

Location: Huntsville, AL

Marital Status: Married

Gender: Female

...accompanied by a photo of Edmund.

(see full profile for yourself)

We joked about it for months. Open season on riceboys. If we wanted to find a ricer, we knew where to look: no further than opening night of "2 Fast 2 Furious." It stood to reason that the kind of person who would see that movie on opening night would also be the kind of person who got their jollies showing off their car in the parking lot for everyone else who had nothing better to do than to obsess over the vehiculage of others. In other words, I could get all the laughs and snaps I wanted, without even having to buy a movie ticket.