life in blog

I have been blogging for a pretty long time--more than six and a half years, or close to a third of my life.

Creepy? A little bit.

It also means that some very weird things have happened on/around my blog, and I am going to share one particularly weird experience here, because I am thinking of mining some of it for my final project. (It’s one of those things that’s so surreal that it seems a shame not to use it toward some more-or-less productive end…) This anecdote is at least among the top five weirdest things that have happened to me on the internet.

Some time in 2001, I received an e-mail almost entirely written in German. It ended with an English salutation, and a very particular one--"Deepest love."

So, since I was a nice kid, I replied and told him that he'd sent the e-mail to the wrong person. Since letters ending with "deepest love" are generally important, it seemed like he would want to know.

A couple of days later he e-mails me back explaining that though the letter was not intended for me, it actually sort of was. Basically, he had been reading my blog and website (which he’d found through a search engine), and he’d decided that I was actually his ex-girlfriend. My name could apparently have been a nickname for her, and he saw himself in a lot of the things I was writing.

We corresponded briefly after this bizarre misunderstanding, until about two months later, when I received another German e-mail. I had a friend translate it (which was marginally better than putting it through Altavista Babelfish). Basically, it accused me of being a liar, then asked if I would meet him at some fast-food place in Berlin.

So I replied, insisting that I most definitely could not do that, since I lived in the U.S. (this was back when I was relatively careful about giving out identifying information, which WhoIs has just shot to hell by now).

…and he just really, really did not believe me.

Oddly, I still receive occasional e-mails from him—sometimes in English, sometimes in German. He’s followed me through several website and e-mail address changes. On the rare occasions when I try to respond, his e-mail account doesn’t exist. But it’s all very, very strange.

There is some argument to be made here about the hazards of allowing kids to play unsupervised on the internet (which I did from about 1997 on), I’m sure, but that doesn’t really interest me.

What does interest me is that this incident made me extremely uncomfortable. I really thought that I was unique—that there was no way someone could so entirely mistake someone else’s life for mine. But here was a girl from halfway across the world whose thoughts and relationships were similar enough to mine that somebody could get them mixed up. (There is, of course, always the possibility that this guy was just crazy…but I don’t really think so.) And more than that—there was nothing I could do to prove that I was who I said I was. I could post pictures, but they could be someone else’s; I could give out a phone number or home address, and they could be random chosen from the pone book. It’s so easy to be a completely fictional person on the internet without ever even knowing, and it’s so hard to prove that you’re a real one. It’s pretty disconcerting.