Tag Archives: the internet

Don’t be Internet Creepy

21 Nov

Here is a weird thing that happened this morning. (By the way it is only 9:30am and I am already having a little bit of a stress attack due to The Internet. It is TOO EARLY for such nonsense.) So I woke up this morning to a bunch of alerts on my phone. This is normal. The following fit squarely into the “normal” category:

1. Really late text messages from people wondering if I am working or out, or from people wanting to send me hilarious gifs and messages because, I have come to realize, I am the person for a lot of people where when something funny or weird happens and they think to themselves “who would appreciate this?” the answer is Rebekah. Rebekah would appreciate it. So I get a lot of funny texts which makes me exceedingly happy. Especially when I read them first thing in the morning. Great way to start the day. For real. I am not being sarcastic. Please keep sending them. Please.

2. A bunch of emails but mostly they are bullshit, like investment advice and crap from The Central Park Conservancy, a mailing list that I never signed up for and have unsubscribed from about a dozen times, not that anyone is counting.

3. A notification of all the apps on my phone that need updates which I mostly ignore because most the apps came with my phone and they are stupid.

4. A New York Times rundown that I peruse because it is good to know the happs, even the very limited happs from the perspective of one news source.

Those things are all normal. Sometimes, though, things that are abnormal happen. Or at least slightly out of the ordinary. Those sorts of things are exciting. Here is a list of some of the things that happen overnight that when I wake up I’m like “woah! What could this be about?!”:

1. Comments on this blog. The thing about that though is that when I receive comments on this blog during the night they are usually either spam (recently a lot of the spam that has been getting through is from a junk account called “testosterone pills” and I can’t for the life of me figure out why this account won’t stop hounding me via nonsensical crap) or from the psycho lawyer who sends me mean messages from throw away email accounts when he’s wasted at like 3am on a Wednesday.

2. New blog followers and blog likes. That makes me feel good! It has been a slow-growth process but one of these days shit will get real. I believe it.

3. Twitter activity! I am not good at Twitter. I have been trying to get better at it by posting things more often and that seems to be working out okay for example the other day I made a new Twitter friend and I felt pretty good about it. We Tweeted back and forth for a few minutes. About Anonymous. It was invigorating.

4. Facebook friend requests. Okay, this is a mixed bag. I am not excited about this so much as slightly nervous. It’s like, when I click on the thing to see who is trying to be my “friend,” I kind of cringe and halfway look away, as if whoever it is is going to somehow jump out of the phone and do, well, I don’t know what they would do. Depends on the person I guess. If it was this one kid I went to middle school with he would tell me I had boogers on my nose. He always used to tell me that whether I had boogers or not. I blame him for my rather unladylike habit of wiping my nose on my sleeve.

5. Instagram things. I have been really liking Instagram. I follow NatGeo and that is really awesome. The other day they posted this video of a parasitic wasp larva that eats a spider and then takes over the spider’s web and it was totally awesome. Gross, but awesome. Also my friends do cool shit. And The Fat Jewish is on there and that cracks me up. That account put on a really fucked up joke about Anne Frank that I shouldn’t have laughed at but I did. Really hard. It made me feel bad about myself as both a Jew and a human being.

6. LinkedIn notifications. Did I even spell the site right? I don’t know and honestly, I don’t really care. And that is because I am less excited about these than any of the other things because, meh, professional networking site. What a snooze.

Anyway, so whenever any of these abnormal things happen I think to myself, “self, today is going to be a bizarre and interesting day.” And today is one such day. So this is what happened:

  • I woke up this morning and realized that I had a request on LinkedIn.
  • I went onto LinkedIn and looked at the profile and realized that I had no clue who this person was but that we do have some ‘interests’ in common, at least as far as LinkedIn is concerned, and we had two shared contacts who, as far as I know, don’t know one another. Okay! Seems legit!
  • I approved the LinkedIn contact because, really, what do I care. I don’t really use LinkedIn. Too stuffy. My photo is of me drinking a cup of coffee in Guatemala. Decidedly unprofessional.
  • I got a new endorsement from my new LinkedIn contact who somehow magically knows what I am good at? LinkedIn is so silly.
  • A few moments later I had a notification from Twitter that I had gotten a new follower. How fun! Then I realized that my new follower was none other than my new LinkedIn connection. What a strange coincidence!
  • More notifications from Twitter! A new retweet! And a favorite! Wow! What a day! Wait? Is that who I think it is? It is! My new Twitter follower who also happens to be my new LinkedIn connection.
  • I felt weird so I went on the GChatz and immediately chatted my friend and told her about all the events and she was like “cool? but maybe mostly creepy?” and then….

Me: oh my god and now he found me on Facebook! WHAT THE FUCK?!
CJ Rene: who is he?
Me: I DON’T KNOW! (I was stuck in caps. It happens more often than I care to admit.)

So then I looked at his LinkedIn page and I realized that people on LinkedIn can see when you look them up on there which is part of the reason I never use it and then I had a freak out. Because I don’t want him to know I am looking! But my friend told me that he is being creepy so obviously I would look at his page but he probably doesn’t think he is being creepy. Maybe this is normal for him? Like, a normal day like one of my normal days during which I do not connect with strangers on every social media platform I can think of. So then I thought maybe I would message him on Twitter and be like,

“Um, hey, I’m sure you’re nice and all but what you’re doing right now with the rapid-fire connecting on The Internet is really bugging me out.”

But you can’t message someone on Twitter unless you are following one another and I wasn’t following him so that avenue was closed to me. So I did the only reasonable thing, I rejected the friend request. I did that because, well, I don’t know this person and also because I don’t want to encourage him to then try and find me on Instagram. And then I felt really happy that I upped my Instagram security settings because, as my friend Emily said, “no one needs their Instagram being public.” So true. And then I started writing this blog.

There are a few points to this story. One of the points is that even when you are well-intentioned, which this person might very well be, going on a connection spree with someone you don’t know, especially someone of the opposite gender, can be seen as a little, um, weird? And also scary? Especially when that person happens to be sort of afraid of The Internet even though all her shit is on here and easily searchable, as was reenforced this morning by the aforementioned story. I guess I already really explained the other point which is that I am scared of The Internet. Like, actually terrified of it. And it is maybe good to be reminded every now and again that the things that are out there don’t just go into the abyss, they are findable and readable by all sorts of people, well-meaning or otherwise.

So that’s today. I am going to go for a run now and contemplate The Internet and my presence on it. And also wonder whether my new LinkedIn connection, Twitter follower and rejected Facebook friend is reading this blog. And if after reading it he unconnects and unfollows. Only time will tell. Stay tuned.

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The Internet Does it Again

16 Apr

So I am having this funny thing happen right now which is that my blog has been getting lots of hits.  And it’s not because I have been writing lots of new and really great posts.  It’s because I wrote a letter to my Dad on his birthday and apparently there are a lot of non-creative people out there who are searching for a letter to a dad.  And it has left me wondering…has anyone given the letter I wrote to my dad to their own dad?  And like, what would their dad say about that?

Um…that’s really nice and all honey but I don’t remember any of these things happening.

I suppose that could work if this person’s dad has amnesia or is an alcoholic or drug addict and therefore doesn’t remember certain details of their kids’ upbringing.  But even still.  I mean, I called out my siblings in my post and I would be very, very surprised if there was someone who had a dad who was an addict or had amnesia who also had siblings (and a super awesome sibling-in-law who is more an actual sister than a sister by marriage) named Aaron, Lucy and Claire.  It’s possible, I suppose, but extremely unlikely.

I mean, I don’t know, I just can’t imagine going on The Internet and being like

Wow, it’s my dad’s birthday and I want to write him a letter. Maybe someone else has written a letter that I can use.

And then coming across my letter.  I then wonder whether upon reading my letter they are like

Wow, this girl is strange.

Or if they say

What an interesting letter!

And then they go ahead and read other posts on my blog and come across this one about poop or this one about the time I accidentally maced myself in the face and then they’re like

Wow, this girl is strange.  Also stupid.  And totally disgusting.

I don’t know.  The possibilities are endless, really.

In other news, did anyone else learn about the US Airways tweet containing a photo of a girl with a model airplane stuck in her vagina?   I just…The Internet.  It has so many things.  So many weird and inappropriate things that just pop up randomly in very unexpected places.  Sort of like there you are, lying in your bed, and BAM! Boeing 777 in your vagina!  And you have no idea how it got there!  That’s what The Internet is like.  It’s like, you start searching for something about population growth.  Then you end up on something about population control.  And then you wind up on some article about forced sterilization.  And then you find a horribly racist conversation between a bunch of skinheads saying terrible things and you just want to go hide in a cave because, as I have said before, they let anyone on The Internet these days.  And then you berate yourself for reading the comments because you should know to never, ever, ever read the comments.  Even on an article about how cute bunnies are the comments are not safe.  Somehow someone will take bunnies and go somewhere incredibly racist with it and you won’t even know what happened and then you will look down and BAM!  Boeing 777 in your vagina.  Well, not literally but you get the picture.  No pun intended.

I don’t know how I got from people reading a letter I wrote to a girl with a model airplane stuck in her cootchie.  See?  The Internet did it again.

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The Internet Thinks I Like Justin Bieber

26 Mar

This is a rant about the internet.

So I, like most people, mostly enjoy the internet.  Obviously, I have an internet presence.  The internet, thanks to this blog, knows all about my period and that time I wiped my ass with my left hand in a small little bathroom in Lima.  One day, I swear, I am going to go to a job interview and they are going to tell me that I was never actually considered for the position but they wanted to see the face of the idiot who consistently shares stories about her own stupidity, as if anyone even fucking cares anyway.  Yup, they are going to laugh me out of the office and give me a roll of toilet paper as a sort of  going away present.  This has gotten entirely off track.

The internet.  So this is sort of how I feel about the internet.  Okay, so, I really like to go grocery shopping.  I find grocery stores to be highly organized, which I enjoy.  I also like to think about the hierarchy of product placement and about how the ways that companies get stores to place their food directly impacts the buying habits of American shoppers.  It’s cool to think about but also sort of depressing because it’s like, goddamnit we are so susceptible to bullshit.  Anyway, the grocery store has long been one of my favorite places to go.  Don’t believe me?  Ask my mom.  She’ll tell you.  And you would think that, since I love grocery stores and because I am an American, that the bigger the grocery store the better!  You would be wrong.  When I come upon an extra large grocery store I am initially really excited about it.  All the aisles, the products, the people watching, the unnecessary diversity of cereals and ice creams.  But I find those really big grocery stores to be incredibly overwhelming.  It’s like, I walk in, stroll through a few aisles, then experience sensory overload, forget what I needed to buy (even if I have thought in advance and made a list!) and flee through the automatic doors.  It’s just too much.  That is sort of how I feel about the internet.  I have my few pages that I frequent, and then I’m like,

God, the internet is so boring.  There is nothing to do here!

so I try and find some new places and all of a sudden I have like 25 tabs open concerning all these things that I didn’t know existed that all of a sudden I just have to know about.  And inevitably some percentage of those things are evil.  Like, I was reading about this woman who faked her own pregnancy and somehow ended up on the webpage of one of those people who thinks homosexuality can be cured through prayer.  I would have left the room screaming if I wasn’t in my own damn bedroom and the only place to go in my current outfit was the kitchen from where I would have to eventually return.  I closed the tab.  It’s like, the internet is a long hallway with all these doors and you literally never know what is going to be behind the door when you open it.  It might be a really pleasant looking door, with pictures of Dan Rydell on the front, but then you open it and BAM it’s like Rush Limbaugh’s fan group’s headquarters.  Or something.  But the thing about the internet is that for as much as you don’t know about it, it knows everything about you.  Or so it thinks.

This is actually what I set out to write about before I went all crazy with grocery store analogies and Rush Limbaugh fan groups.

Okay, so, the internet tracks the things that you do on so that it can plaster whatever page you are visiting with an ad about Made Well jeans because sometimes, when you are feeling a little sad and like your wardrobe sucks, you peruse the Made Well webpage and look at clothing you can’t afford.  Which, as you can imagine, only makes you feel sadder and more like your wardrobe sucks.  But then it’s like, you can’t even choose when you want to do that because it is everywhere.  Want to research the Genocide Convention for an article you are writing? Made Well jeans.  Want to look up the Quechuan word for avocado (it’s palta, FYI)?  Made Well jeans.  Want to watch the highest scoring beam routine at the Jesolo gymnastics meet?  You guessed it, Made Well jeans.  You get the picture.  So meanwhile, as you are being absolutely inundated with advertisements for luxury clothing items, Twitter can’t seem to come up with hashtags that actually relate to things you would be interested in reading about.  It has this trending thing, whereby it theoretically takes information about the people you are following combined with your location and then suggests a whole bunch of hashtags that might be of interest to you.  So, I follow a whole bunch of feminists and a few of my good friends (most of whom are feminists) and Twitter suggests #2YearsofBoyfriend which is a hashtag about Justin Bieber’s song that I have never even heard before (I had to look it up to see what the hell the hashtag even meant).  It also suggested #GetWellJimKelly and #CrappySnacks.  I just don’t know.

And then there is LinkedIn.  Now this is really weird.  So I used to work at Restaurant Gordon Ramsay in midtown.  The restaurant was located in the lobby of The London hotel.  The hotel had this doorman named Collin who was really nice who I used to always talk to. Collin and I never interacted on the internet.  I never put on my LinkedIn profile that I worked at Gordon Ramsay (I don’t think I even had a LinkedIn profile back then) and yet, the other day it suggested that I connect with Collin even though we had absolutely no shared connections!  How did it know?!  How can it connect me to some random doorman with whom I have had absolutely no electronic communication and yet elsewhere on the internet it thinks I give a damn about Justin Bieber?!  I literally do not understand.  I do not understand and I also find myself pretty damn terrified.

I just don’t know, you guys.  The internet.  It like knows everything and nothing at once.  Sometimes I think maybe I should just like exit the internet and go live in a cave somewhere (or just my bedroom only this time with no online access).  Then maybe I could go meet my friend out at a bar without this guy threatening to laugh in my face.

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