Learning The Hard Way

AS WE ALL TRY to sort out just exactly what happened between the notre dame football player and the online girlfriend, the situation might remind a few of us of events in our own past online lives. It does me.

I haven't bothered to sort through the details of the story, haven't read anything about it, got better things to do. But it sure does remind me of something that happened to me...had i been he, i would have wanted to hear her voice, to speak on the telephone, at least once, to prove her existence. and if she had not cooperated, i would have been suspicious. Surely, at some point, he was.

Or did he find out the truth, that his online girlfriend didn't "exist", and then continue playing along because he enjoyed the fantasy, or because he was too embarassed to admit the truth, or because he wanted to find a way to gather information about the perpetrator of the hoax?

Well, it turns out, they did speak on the phone, so, she did "exist". She was real, a real person. and eveidntly she was the same person on phone and online. And, if he and she both said she was his girlfriend(s), who are we to argue? The only "hoax" part was her fake death, and anyone who would do such a thing, well, never was really a girlfriend at all, was she...

I guess all that will be sorted out by our ever vigilant watch dog media, which apperantly fell for the
 hoax right along with everyone else. The media, it seems wanted to story to be true, at all costs, even at the cost of skepticism, source confirmation, journalistic intergrity.

Then too, the american media likes to turn everything into high drama, the higher, more dramatic the better, to keep that audience mesmerized, and those ad revenues soaring. The mainstream american media is neither liberal nor conservative; its just plain old greedy, like the rest of us.

My girl was quite real, and she lived in new jersey, but said she was tired of it. She said she was thinking of taking her kids to australia, to get away from ceratan unsavory new jersey gang types, and i suggested she move to arkansas, nearly as far away, but a bit less of a cultural shock..maybe..

We talked on the phone often, and whoever she was, she certainly had a new joisey accent. She had quite a story; born in israel, emigrated at eight, grew up on the streets, became a prostitute, married a member of the newly arrived russian mafia, three kids, seeking escape. A nice person, from what i could tell.

Then i got an email telling me she had been murdered. All in all , it seemed plausible. I was horrified, and grief stricken. I even turend to a detective to find out the truth. Several weeks later she called me, and confessed:

..she had faked her death becasue of her decision to marry a man and stay in new jersey, and her reluctance to break the news to me.  Well, whatever. that was eleven years ago. I hope she and family are doing fine.

Years from now this football player, perhaps after completing a successful NFL career and raising a famly of his own, will look back on this episode and smile, perhaps a bit pensively. For the time being, he'll be a bit more internet savvy. I know I am.