Maybe Neil didn’t respond to Christine because he apparently has 331 other MySpace friends. I start browsing through all these profiles and opening about every other one — so many look like someone interesting, someone I want to know, someone I want to date. Page after page of twenty-somethings, rows of thumbnails of laughing, exclaiming, posing, mocking, daring faces making up for their anonymity with their own impressions of audacity.
Someone going by “the the the” lists his interests as “pretending to be an intellectual when I’m really just an asshole”. A guy wearing a shirt saying “Slut” on it has a picture of himself riding a pony at the mall, head-banging and making the devil’s symbol. A girl with the screen name “diSfUckTioNaL,” whose age is “99,” has a picture of an upside-down nude with “I” and “you” on either side of the model’s heart-shaped vulva. Just below this are at least fifteen comments wishing “diSfUckTioNaL” a “happy b-day”. And below this is a comment from “jesus groupie” saying “kara, i fuckin hate you. i fuckin hate you so fuckin much i want to scream. anyway, what are you doing tonight?”
The constant flippancy gets tiresome fast unless it’s well done. And some of them are. One girl I notice, “minimalist sinner,” has pictures of herself all tramped up, makeup gooped all over, in the gaudiest of outfits. She somehow manages to retain a sexy cool even as she tries to look like shit. In one picture, her eyes widen in mock-sleaze as she flicks her tongue between two fingers shaped like a V.
And on all of these profiles, everyone lists every single band they’re into, sometimes forty and fifty long, most of which I’ve never even heard of. Pleasure Forever and The Books, Nouvelle Vague and the Anti-Pop Consortium — surely such fantastic names can’t be masking shitty bands, right? I need to remember to look up everyone of them.
It all makes me anxious to get away from this damned desk, get out and meet some people and work on something creative. Just get through the day, and then you can work on something creative this weekend — I don’t really know what, but just something. Learn Photoshop or learn web design so you can make your own little magazine and put all kinds of sarcastic, crazy stuff up there.
Someone’s friend has a picture of a five- or six-year-old girl, far too adorable, with the warmest, most genuine-looking smile I think I’ve ever seen. Her profile says “my little Catalina is the photosynthesis of my life”. The daughter’s wearing this cute, cute plush red smock with a white blouse with these beautiful ruffles — far more finely dressed than I usually am. That lovely smile on her face makes me tense up in my seat as much as all these bands and the thought of going out and getting away from this office do. I’m already four years older than my mom was when she had me and —