My Instagram Crush

 

Well, that was bound to happen. After all, I’ve been on Instagram – what, a whole month?

 

What IS it with me and social media? How is it that I can get attracted to someone who I’ve never touched?

I’ve had mad crushes on people I’ve met blogging. Too many.

I fell in love with Jennie Saia after only blogging a few weeks, and only 2 weeks after “meeting” her. I actually declared my love for her in the comment section of a post I felt in every cell of my body. It’s there now, for all eternity – or until she shuts down her blog.

Jennie in real life turned out to be pretty much the same as Jennie on the blog. It’s very disappointing when you have feelings for someone based on how they write, or the personality they portray online, only to find they’re not at all like that when you really get to know them.

The Honoré de Balzac school of “be sexually charming and financially wise in your literary work, while in real life be a complete asshole who dies broke and in debt.”

I suppose I’m guilty of that. My blog persona is much tougher and care free, and way less needy and crazy, than me in real life.

 

I had a pointless, unsatisfying, destructive emotional affair with someone via Facebook. I was ripe for that one.

I’d just spent several months at the receiving end of a vicious hate campaign directed at me because my writing mentor was accused of being a predator and ousted offline. I would have grown attached to Hitler if he contacted me online and acted kind and sympathetic.

Actually, Hitler probably would have been less disingenuous. The whole experience was so bizarre I’m writing a book about it. You’ll have to wait for that one to come out to get those juicy details.

 

I’ve been temped on Twitter. I’ve been direct messaged by some really cute (I guess?) people who wanted to get to know me, but Twitter doesn’t do it for me. It’s like trying to connect with someone in a hippodrome while thousands of people shout to no one in particular “HEY LOOK AT ME HEY LISTEN HEY LOOK AT ME ME ME ME!”

 

I originally opened an Instagram account because I had broken up with Facebook after being booted off. I was told that people connected at BlogHer through instagram.

In the end, anyone I wanted to meet up with I texted, or, if I didn’t know their phone number, we tweeted one another. As a matter of fact, it was fun getting tweets from people like Kitten Holiday so we could announce online in front of all our followers just how awkward we felt at BlogHer:

 

 

 

I like Instagram. I can get in, and get out and catch up with the latest adventures of friends and fellow bloggers. I don’t get sucked into a social media black hole; where I spend 10 minutes that morphs, through cyber alchemy, into 2 hours.

I don’t have much to say on Instagram; most people I follow don’t. A few words to caption your picture, some cool #hastags to encourage people to land on your photo. I have to stop myself from hashtagging every photo I post with “This is how we #fuckshitup.” It would make no sense, but still, the urge is there.

So what do I post? Rock tee shirts of the day, or skull tees of the day, usually. One or two pictures of my face from when I attended BlogHer, the first weekend I had my account.

Because I am a woman, and I don’t post pictures that attest to a husband or boyfriend, I receive direct messages on Instagram from men. I’m always a little surprised. My snarky personality is not at all in evidence; I say very little. I’m not scantily clad; although the very first picture I posted was the infamous one that showed up in the WordPress Reader, me in my bondage bra.

I snapped the pic and posted it because after I checked into the hotel, I realized that walking through the lobby of the Hilton clad in my bra was now off my bucket list, and I felt like commemorating the occasion with photographic evidence.

I ignore the messages.

Usually.

A really good looking English guy with a muscular physique and lots of ink starting “liking” all my rock tees and we followed each other. I say he’s English, but I really don’t know except he called me his “favourite” and I hope he’s not Canadian.

He appears to be traveling the world, or at least Europe, and I believe his home is in England. I’ve no clue. I know very little about him but he’s dead sexy to look at and he has a habit of captioning his photos with rock lyrics.

I’m a nerd with an almost encyclopedic knowledge of rock lyrics. I held back responding to his captions with the next line of the song so I wouldn’t seem like I was being a know-it-all until the day he posted a line from my favorite Patti Smith song, “Rock And Roll Nigger.” He wrote “outside of society” and I responded with “That’s where I want to be.”

He wrote that he couldn’t believe I knew that, and I answered that I couldn’t believe everyone else didn’t. It’s a fucking great song.

Seriously. Stop right this second and listen to it on YouTube. There isn’t one single thing I, or anyone for that matter, has to say that is more important than you listening to this song RIGHT THIS SECOND. I would post the video here but then it will show up in the Reader as my post image (ha, in your FACE WordPress, I am on to your trickery!)

It progressed from there. He would post a picture from where he was in the world, captioning it with a song lyric (“Look at those cavemen go”) and I would respond with the next lyric (“It’s the freakiest show”) and so on.

I got a direct message from him and I was instantly nervous. It’s SUCKS donkey balls when you open up a message from a man you don’t know and it’s a dick pic. And I liked his taste in music as well as his tattoos and muscles, so I did not want a reason to dislike him.

It was just this: “You drive me crazy.”

He’s only seen my covered torso. I don’t say anything flirty or sexy in any of my captions. Why was I driving him crazy? Was this a good thing?

So I asked him “is this a good thing?”
Apparently, it was. And so, it began.

 

Why do I develop crushes on people I’ll likely never meet? Won’t ever touch or hug or probably never even hear?

I suppose everyone who’s everyone had an online crush has a reason. For me, it’s safe. I can invest just a part of me, maybe more than I wanted intentionally, but certainly not the same amount I would invest in a real life person I was involved with.

It’s like having a de facto boyfriend, which is Latin for “my therapist is gonna love hearing about this guy.” You can’t get hurt, although in truth I did get hurt with that Facebook debacle, but that was only because he convinced me that we were having a “real” relationship and I bought it.

I won’t get fooled again.

I’m seeing someone in real life. Is it crazy that, at this moment, I like Instagram Man better?

Don’t answer that.

 

Did you ever have an online crush? (You KNOW you have). Was it fun? Can you talk about it even? 
If you can, then talk to me.  I’m listening. 

Follow me on Instagram so I look popular.

And Now, EVERYONE Knows What I Look Like

 

It would have been problematic to walk around BlogHer with my hair artfully swept in front of my face all weekend.

 

According to the lady at the waxing salon, Instagram is the best way to network. Evidently, some chick who pours hot wax on my vag is the final word on networking, because I opened my Instagram account the day before BlogHer.

Annnnd, I posted pictures of myself on it. By the second day, I could no longer resist taking selfies with other bloggers. EVERYONE was doing it, and I was stupid drunk just got into the spirit of things.

 

The first day of BlogHer, I clung anxiously to Quirky Chrissy, who took excellent care of me. She was completely chill about me being up her ass like a suppository. Chrissy is one of the most positive, light-filled people I’ve ever met. Even hungover, her optimism defies logic.

I stopped attending sessions at BlogHer, after sitting through ones that informed me I was violating all “rules” of blogging. My posts are too long, my titles suck, I have no niche, I don’t organize my blog-related files (organize my blog files? I get outwitted by laundry).

I did some networking at the Expo, and found out that although I can’t earn actual money writing for brands, I CAN get paid in dog food. I’m gonna buy a dog so I can finally monetize this blogging thing.

 

The best part of the conference was not the sessions or the Expo. It was the camaraderie. In my soulless suburban neighborhood, women specialize in haughty standoffish-ness.  At BlogHer, the default behavior is “Hey! Let’s hang out!”

 

I was very much ME at the conference. And people still liked me.

– I dress like a middle aged rock star frantically trying to beat back death by shopping at Hot Topics.

– I am clumsy. Chrissy and Joules watched me slam-walk straight into a glass door.

– I’m a hot mess who loses EVERYTHING. I lost my wallet (recovered!), my conference badge (got another) and my sunglasses (prescriptions Ray Bans, sadly gone forever.)

– I can be nutty. The first thing I did after meeting Chrissy was jump up and down on her bed shouting “WHERE ARE THE LESBIANS???”

– I say inappropriate things, like, “Okay, I’m gonna go to my room, watch a little porn on my phone and touch myself.”

– I do inappropriate things, like grinding up against the beautiful Ponies and Martinis while dancing at the closing party. She was totally cool about it, even though I held about as much appeal as a kid grabbing on your clean blouse with greasy French Fry fingers.

– I am an incorrigible flirt. I picked up a man in the elevator.

This one needs an explanation, so I don’t sound like a slutty elevator strumpet. I was waiting for the hotel elevator with Chrissy and Joules, deep in discussion about whether testicles are essential, because, you know, that’s a vital topic to discuss in public.

A hot guy emerged from the hotel gym and joined in our conversation. We all bantered in the elevator, and because his chiseled abs showed through his sweaty shirt he seemed interesting, I asked him,  “Are you single?” He was, and asked for my number.

He then exited the elevator on the wrong floor 3 times, claiming that I “made him nervous.” It think it was more that I was wearing this:

 

 

 

 

Apparently, when I drink I feel the need to make out with bloggers like Aussa Lorens.

 

And Minions.

 

I’m practically blind without my glasses (which I wasn’t wearing, because that would make too much sense). So I introduced myself to bloggers with my “Helen Keller at the dinner table” impersonation, in which I would grab the badge from around their necks and yank it up to see who they were.

This was how Dawn and I discovered simultaneously who the other was, and SCREAMED at the top of our lungs in the hotel lobby like two hyenas escaped from the Central Park zoo.

Gunmetal Geisha is an enchanting, ultra feminine waif. She captured the whole experience on video but I swear that’s not why I’m saying all these nice things bout her.

I’ve “known” Emily as long as I’ve been blogging, but our friendship was firmly cemented when she proclaimed at the closing party, “If you can’t appreciate the glory of David Bowie you have no soul.”

Usually when I meet someone and I feel like I know them, it’s because they were in jail with me. Lucy, however, I think was my sister in another life. She took off this necklace and gifted it to me:

 

 

Molly (A Mother Life) is a funky redhead with a killer Aussie accent, Sarah (est. 1975) is even FUNNIER in person than on her blog, Jen Kehl, techie goddess extraordinaire, of COURSE had an extra phone charger thingey when my phone died.

 

The closing night party was on Pier 84 in Manhattan. The food was by McDonald’s, but cheeseburgers become ambrosia when a wait staff of all gorgeous male models serves them to you on trays.

As the sun set over the Hudson River, we drank free booze and danced our faces off to old school R&B. In between dancing, l lounged on the grass with the coolest group of chicks ever.

I started the weekend a nervous introverted wreck. I ended it laying on a blanket on the grass, laughing, talking, cuddling with my head in Lucy’s lap, purring contentedly while watching the stars in the night sky.

 

Writing is how I breathe. However, it can be a very lonely endeavor. I began blogging because I craved interaction. For me, that was my main takeaway from the conference. I connected.

Online friendships are missing a crucial physical component, that of touch. At BlogHer, I was able to hug/kiss/grab/grind/snuggle/hold all the people I’ve “known” online.

The beautiful people who have lived in my heart for a year and a half, became real.

 

Have you been to a blog conference?  Have you met people you know from the Internet in real life?
What was I thinking with that outfit with my bra showing??   Talk to me. I’m listening.