Ye Olde Pastime of Internet Stalking

I can never tell whether I should be grateful we have the internet or rue the day we ever met. Sure, we have everything at the tip of our fingers but when paired with a broken heart, that's when information becomes too much. Finally, the questions you've been wrenching your guts over can finally be answered: How fast did they get over us? Were they cheating this whole time? Are they actually. happy. without. me?

It's hard to believe, this person actually getting over you. Prior to internet stalking, whenever a boy would turn me down (for shame!) or break my heart, I would try to hold strong and pretend that they didn't exist or that they spontaneously combusted. This theory of spontaneous combustion works very well in terms of helping you move on. No more lingering feelings or "what if" wonderings. There is no guilt in sending thoughts of ill will upon them because spontaneous combustion is a pure act of nature -- or karma -- that even you can't control. Perhaps you can look upon your time together with (almost) nostalgia and not ever have to imagine how good the sex they're having with someone else is.

But now! Oh, the gluttony of the internet and its networking sites, blogs and Flickr galore! Those keyed into the internet can now see Exes whenever they want, message them, see the pics of the new S.O. (significant other), read about how happy -- or, even better! how sad -- they are in their new lives minus you. For the truly obsessive, you watch their progress, hope for something to fail, wish for your own loserness to disappear and make promises never to visit these foreboden sites; meanwhile, you end up doing anything except the required moving on.

Now this isn't to chastise the internet and make it feel bad but for all its Information Highway-ness, it still has a sense of lacking. In mystery. I twice quit MySpace for telling me things I didn't want to know -- how, yes, he has a gf despite words convincing me otherwise -- it's been a tough realization that the Internet is what you make it. While his lying ass was hardly MySpace's fault, I didn't want the drama that I associated with all networking sites. Now, nearly two years later, I am a blogger, MySpacer, Facebooker and (briefly) Nerve.com gal. I have finally learned to reassociate these sites with something good and useful. I'm grasping the concept of mystery and self-control and now know that there is goodness in the internet.

But still: Clicker, beware.

Don't say I didn't warn you.

(pic courtesy of NaOH on Flickr)