MySpace

The first time I discovered that something was terribly wrong with me was when I was in the bathroom as a 14-year-old kid and realized the horrific truth that I had asshole hair.

The second time I discovered that something was terribly wrong with me was a few months ago. It was one of my first weekends here at Champaign and I found myself dancing at a local club with an attractive girl. She was tall — maybe even taller than me — and she had long, dark brown hair that contrasted with her electric blue eyes. This girl leaned close to me as we danced, her hair brushing against my neck and shoulders, and she said what sounded to me like: “Do you want to go back to my place?”

I was taken aback. It seemed my friends were right about the Champaign girls here being so forward. But this was just unreal. We had only danced to two songs and this girl was ready to jump into the sack with me. Feeling chivalrous, I smiled and replied, “Hey, I just met you. Let’s just have fun here, alright?”

Her electric eyes looked a little confused for a moment, then she shouted into my ear, “No, I said, do you have MySpace?”

“Oh... Whoops, sorry. Um... Hell no, I hate that MySpace crap. AIM wastes enough of my day as it is. Why would I want to invest hours of my precious internet time on that trendy, poorly-designed piece of website garbage that caters to the petty teenaged, identity-obsessed demographic? And all those MySpace geeks have pages with either those obnoxious seizure-inducing backgrounds or some crappy song which will automatically start playing. Gosh, I hate that. Fuck!”

The girl nodded weakly, then left me in the middle of the dance floor. I kid you not: a girl lost interest in me because of my disdain for MySpace.

And it didn’t even have anything to do with asshole hair, either.

But this is when I realized what an oddball I was when it came to MySpace. Even though I could never understand the intense appeal, almost all of my friends have MySpace and are crazy about it. Some of them even say it’s one of the best things the Internet has ever spawned, right up there with the blog phenomenon, AIM, Ebay, and the Weatherbug.

I’ve had friends beg me to almost the point of tears to join the MySpace bandwagon, but I’ve resisted this peer pressure, mostly because I’ve always waved it off as a fad that has little benefit to me. A few years down the road, people will no doubt cringe in shame when they watch a segment about MySpace on VH1’s “I Love 2005”.

Yesterday, however, I caved and joined the dark side. And it’s all Missy and Angie’s fault.

How it happened is Angie started begging for me to join, for the 58942nd time, but this time she was offering her and Missy’s bodies. “Oh Petey...” she said. “If you join MySpace, Missy and I will sleep with you. You can take my virginity... and as for Missy, well, you can just have sex with her.”

I said, Excuse me?

“We don’t even have to use a rubber, Petey.”

Feeling chivalrous as always, I said, “Hey, you know what, what the heck. I’ll join. But keep your clothes on. You girls don’t need to sleep with me. Just put me in your Top 8 Friends.”