ME – 101 – Live Chats

I discovered (or was made aware of…) live chat rooms about a year ago….and by live chat, I mean a site in cyberspace with 5-10-20 or more different people typing back and forth with each other.


Conversation in a good, live chat room can be lightning quick or very slow, depending on the typing speed of the individuals and how detailed they want to get in a response. I’ve been in rooms that run very fast, and I have to either drop into text speak (LOL, IMO, OMG, ROFL, FFS, etc….) or designate who I’m responding to (@tiger: LOL, ur nutz :D), and have been in rooms that take the care and time to construct proper sentences. The little smiley emoticons add an interesting texture to the written words, and are used to offer the nuances of facial expressions that would be otherwise missing from the typed text. Chat rooms are my favorite way to congregate with a group of people from across the world.


And, if you get into a quiet chat room with some special, select friends, you can let all your hopes, fears and dreams out. You can bare your soul to people you’ve never laid eyes on. You can fall in love. You can rail at the injustices of the world, or laugh at its silliness. You can offer up sage wisdom and receive it in return. Its intimacy, security, anonymity, and awakening all wrapped with a big, shiny bow when you get into a room with people you’ve established a solid rapport with.


And yes, for all you out there that are reading my words, I have done all of the above in a chat room….I speak from personal experience.


As an aside here…I think that the psychiatric community would make enormous strides in helping those who have emotional difficulties if they would adopt a chat room format, and let people come out about their problems behind the comfort of their personal computers…..far more helpful and therapeutic than pumping these same people full of drugs that only mask the pain, or sitting them on a couch for a one-on-one with a ‘professional.’ After all, life happens 24/7, 365 days a year, and not always during business hours, and its easier to pour out your heart when you don’t have to worry about blubbering incoherently. Although, the tears do make it difficult to read what you’re typing at times :(


Usually, in live chat, my goofy side comes out. I’m the queen of the quick one-liners, offering subtle barbs or thinly-veiled innuendo with quick, sure fingers. My reward is to see those quick lines of text speak, the LOL’s, the ROFL’s, and my favorite, PMSL. I’ve chatted with people in Australia, the UK, Ireland, across all 4 time zones in the US, and as far north as above the Artic Circle.


Our world, once such a big and scary place, has grown so small with these technological advances.