Telenamored

tele- or tel-
[pref.] Distance; distant

enamored
[adjective]
marked by foolish or unreasoning fondness

I know I’ve said before that portmanteau holds a special place in my heart but sometimes it’s the only way to describe a condition.

There are blog crushes, there’s internet stalking, and then there’s being telenamored. Part of my duties in working on the internet is best described as field research. And in turn, internet excavation entails finding really fascinating sites put up by people to whom I will never talk or have any interaction.  So I begin lurking.

There’s the cute girl I found who is detailing the journey about having a sickness that is not yet diagnosed by medical science, and the progress she makes in trying to find out what the problem is.  There’s the guy who works in the video game industry who makes presentations on the subject and is trying to further it as a legitimate art medium.  There’s the fascinatingly snide girl who, for all intents and purposes, is an outright bitch, only on purpose and to everyone, because she hates the world, but for some reason, will drop her guard publicly and let everyone see what’s going on in her head via her blog.  There’s the guy who can make impressively stellar drawings using nothing more than a mouse pointer and a paint program.  There’s the poetess from Ukraine, who writes in English broken only enough to be a special kind of beautifully fragile.

These are the travels of the starship Nicopolitan.  But unlike Captain Kirk, I don’t feel like I should fuck with their respective ecosystems by landing on their stars and traipsing around pretending I belong there.  And you’d think I would, because I work in marketing, and going in blindly (boldly?) to establish a mutually beneficial relationship with site owners is our gig.  But these sites were internet detritus as far as our research goes.  They weren’t targeted as someone who’d be interested in a free blah blah blah in exchange for blah blah blah. blah.  They never got contacted.  But this doesn’t mean that I ditch them.  No, I bookmark them or subscribe to their feeds.  Bloghopping is easy when you do it for a living.

But I read them religiously.  And I miss them when they haven’t posted for a while.  But I can’t tell them this because I feel like there’s an air of illegitimacy by simply the possibility that they’d see me as a spammer.  So I keep these people for myself.

It’s inadvertent stalking.  But it doesn’t really go that far because it’s not like I’m obsessed, either, I just find personal edification in having collected so many different life samples from the internet.

I should probably note that it’s thanks to 20something Bloggers I actually do get to have an exchange with people I love to read, and it’s great being part of a community that didn’t pre-judge me (you guys rule, in all seriousness).  It’s like a grab bag of stuff I love to read; stuff from the giant meta-collective non-fiction of the internet.

When is delurking week, anyway?

Also, holy crap it’s hot out here in LA.