the common wisdom is that you can't fall in love over the internet. and it makes sense, cause how can you love someone who you don't know? but it also doesn't make sense, because in some cases you get to know, if not them, a persona they've chosen. so it might be better to say that you love the persona, but at any rate, it is possible. it happened to me.

i was a teenage chat fiend. i won't say where, mostly because it doesn't matter. what does matter is that there was a boy who was the reason i kept doing it.. or a boy-like persona. this very eloquent, cynical boy. who, at all times, used flawless grammar, and chastised other users who didn't.

it happened to be the case that at that same point in my life, i was eloquent (or at least able to express myself clearly) and cynical and believed that good grammar (including capitalization, even) was a necessity in any written correspondence. so we had that in common. and a little before the time i happened upon him in this particular chat room, i'd taken to making fun of people i perceived to be idiots, which happened to amuse the cool kids in that chat room, and so it came to be that i was accepted into their little group and was hence allowed to speak to this boy, who sometimes went by the name of ben.

note that i never made the assertion that falling in love with people you meet over the internet isn't incredibly stupid. it is. i'm not talking about little net.crushes - i'm speaking of obsessive behavior that supersedes the desire to fulfill one's responsibilities. writing lengthy love emails, fantasizing night and day, planning trips to places where you hope you might just maybe casually run into this person who's stolen your heart. this behavior can get really depressing after a while. eventually (hopefully), you snap out of it.

these days, i do not feel compelled to adhere to the conventions of grammar. it does not make me feel smarter or more expressive. it does not indicate that i am intelligent, deep, or worthy of any sort of special attention. presuming i am able to make myself understood, it's is merely an aesthetic preference. and the conventional preference is one which, for personal reasons, i eschew.