The Asshole Email and the Karmic Vengeance of MySpace.

Since the inception of email, it's been a growing habit that people occasionally write to old friends, significant others, and other people out of their past trying to catch up with whatis going on theiur lives. It's one of the greater things about the internet. It makes finding people easy and communication much more simple. Anyone can have their name not be in the phone book, but you're likely to find out a lot about a person just by Google-ing their name, and that's if you can't them on Friendster or MySpace or some other internet meeting ground.
It also happens though, that people you wish you would never heasr from again find you on the internet. It happened to us all, especially those of us who kind of grew up with the advancement in home computers, emails, and growing technology. It sucks, but we get through by ignoring the emails, or by writing back, but writing something curt and disengenuine.
Well, I wrote one of those emails a little while ago. I know it was wrong. It was shitty. But another good thing about email is that you can say the things you need to say without interruption. You can speak as freely as you want and as long as you want. There's no body language that you can read, thus dictating different courses your rant might take. It's a guilty souls verbal utopia.
I wrote my email to a former friend, who would have been more than a friend, save the fact she had a boyfriend who she had kind of feeling for, though it was never clear what kind or how much. I wrote this email through the service that 70 million of us have come to know as MySpace. MySpace happens to be the primary place that assholes like me can find those we've fallen out of contact with to write our "How have you been" emails, or in my case; mournful and apologetic emails.
So I write this email fully aware of how wrong it is. I even acknowledged it to the person I was writing to. Thus begins the waiting. For about a day I didn't check my mail and when I did the "New Message!" sign was up (first off, they need to ditch the exclamation point when you get a MySpace message from someone who isn't already one of your friends. It should just be a period. It's not going to be an exciting message, otherwise.) So I clicked on it and I had not gotten a response from the person I had written to, but had instead received an email from an old girlfriend I hadn't talked to in 9 years. In all fairness, I couldn't complain. I just sent an email exactly like this so it was somewhat deserved. I opened it and all it said was "How have you been?" What the fuck. That kind of email is the worst. It's a mind-fuck in the disguise of an olive branch. All of a sudden this person has come out of nowhere and this is all they wanted to say? What's the point? Why put someone through that if you don't even have some kind of supplementary questionnaire or synopsis of events from your own life? Grrr! But I can't complain, I did the same thing.
I reply to the email, giving her two sentences. This way I've responded, but I kept it short because I don't really want to to talk to her. I wait, I check MySpace again several hours later (yes, I was obsessing) and the "New message!" ic con is up again. I braced myself, "this is going to be the one." I click it and it's an email from a high school friend I haven't talked to in a long time. Turns out she's got a 16 month old baby and just got married to the father two weeks ago in Las Vegas; fucking awesome.
Once again I reply and wait. I know at this point that I'm getting what I deserve for doing what I did. I began forming images of MySpace having a warehouse somewhere, probably in the midwest, where they track emails, finding those like the one I had written. They trace it back and punish you the same way you've just done it. I know it would be wicked expensive and to do, but it would be worth it just for the cruel irony bit.
I get another email. It happened again. For the third time in two days I've gotten an email from someone I've not seen in years. This one is a girl I kind of just fooled around with and then rudely discarded in high school. She's a real estate agent in North Carolina now. Great. Couldn't be happier. Thanks MySpace. I keep getting this kind of stuff drudged up from the past and not the one I'm actually looking for.
It's been almost a week now since I sent my original email. I finally got a response from the girl I wanted to talk to. It would seem she doesn't want to talk to me. She gave me two sentences.