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The Goddess Speaks
FOR two months, I suffered from daily tension headaches which my internist was unable to relieve. Idle chatter’s just
a big headacheFeeling a need for a release after a hard day at work, I asked my daughter to show me a chat room on the Internet where I could laugh and relax. She showed me a list of rooms and I picked City Pub, a virtual tavern, which had opened a few months before I joined it in February 1997.
I entered the pub using my real name, Glenda, but no one paid attention to me. It was hard to jump into the meandering conversations,especially when everyone was focused on someone else. Could it be my name? I decided to return as gigi-hawaii.
Immediately, I got clicked on by men from Denmark to Australia. Perhaps, the new nickname conjured up an image of a cute 19-year-old in a bikini rather than the middle-aged matron I am. Invariably, the men wanted to know my age. At first, I was coy and said I was 99, but they didn't believe me. How could gigi be over 20?
Later, I tired of the game and revealed my true age and the fact that I am married. In this way, I made friends with more mature members of the room who were interested in the laulau I was cooking for dinner or why I wasn't watching the sunset at the beach.
My headaches disappeared. I anxiously logged on as soon as I came home from work. I was so addicted to the chat room that I barely noticed my husband and children. I even ate my dinner in front of the computer!
Winning a free trip to Las Vegas, my husband and I arranged to meet fellow City Pubbers there:
Steinbeck (a financial analyst who flew in from San Francisco), Lace (an electrical engineer from New Jersey), Crutch (physically handicapped but looking for work in Las Vegas), and Graffi (a single mother of two living with her boyfriend in Las Vegas). We spent four days dining and gambling together, continuing to address each other by our nicknames.
IT was Steinbeck, who recommended that I invest in two technology stocks, Cisco and Lycos, long before they sky-rocketed, and I made a bundle of money because of that advice. City Pub was not only a place to socialize, but it was also a good place to get stock tips.
So why, after two years, did I quit chatting on the Internet? I tired of the daily soap operas: Guy meets girl, guy hops on a plane to be with girl, guy is disillusioned, guy leaves girl, girl's feelings are hurt. Or vice-versa.
Then there was "Theresa," whose love interest "Monsoon," learned of her death during cancer surgery through a phone call from her sister.
There was a funeral online where chatters came to pay their last respects. Everyone eulogized her. Monsoon sobbed, saying he would have married Theresa.
Weeks later, Silver Cloud logged on. Her pop-ups and expressions were the same as Theresa's and we realized that she had not died after all, and didn't have cancer.
She faked her death online because she hated the false persona she had created, for instance, emailing a photo that wasn't hers.
It was hard for pubbers to accept her excuse that she suffered from depression, and harder still to forgive her deception. After the Theresa melodrama, I decided I'd had enough and stopped logging on. Chatters emailed gigi-hawaii to say how much she was missed, but I closed gigi-hawaii's account.
Since June 1999, I haven't chatted online and don't miss it.
After eating dinner in front of the computer for two years, I now sit at the table with my family like a normal person. And the headaches? They haven't come back!
Glenda Chung Hinchey is a library assistant at Liliha Public Library.
The Goddess Speaks runs every Tuesday
and is a column by and about women, our strengths, weaknesses,
quirks and quandaries. If you have something to say, write it and
send it to: The Goddess Speaks, the Honolulu Star-Bulletin, P.O.
Box 3080, Honolulu, 96802, or send e-mail
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