myspace

Dear Facebook,

Thanks for killing Myspace.

Cordially,
Armin

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Dear Myspace,

Thanks for killing Friendster.

Sincerely,
Armin

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Dear Reader,

No I do not have a Facebook account. This is not an act of protest. I have nothing against society, technology, or computers. This might surprise you, but at this very minute I'm using the technology of a computer to write a blog post that will better society. Sort of. Not the betterment of society part, at least.

But anyway, for any of you who have sent me a Facebook request, I am not snubbing you. I just don't feel like signing up for Facebook. Back when I frequented Myspace, I'd only check it regularly when I was still hung up on some old girlfriend, checking her profile constantly to see if there were any hidden messages to me.

"Oooh, she's listening to 'Every Rose Has its Thorn.' Maybe she's trying to tell me that I'm the rose... or its thorn."

And if there was no girl to be heartbroken over, then I rarely checked it.

I know what you're going to say, "Armin, Facebook is SOOOOOOO much better. I mean, like you wouldn't believe how much better. Like an All-You-Can-Eat-Tater-Tots-While-Watching-a-Marathon-of-Van-Damme-Movies better! If Facebook and Myspace were siblings, Facebook would be a virgin prom queen going to Harvard while Myspace would be a limbless thalidomide baby flippering around in its own excrement!"

I get it. Facebook is better. I just don't think I'll be that into it.

But back to my original point, if I even had one. Myspace is dying, and though I don't rue the loss, I did have a little known blog on my page called "Welcome to Earth, Spaceboy." So, as a dying civilization tries to preserve its language in stone, I feel the same need to save some of those blog posts and transfer them over to ATKU. And, yes, it's an easy way to toss out a blog post when I really have nothing new to say. Consider it the same as that bail out episode of your favorite sitcom, the episode that just shows spliced together clips of previous episodes because the writers were thin on ideas that week.

Looking these old posts over, they are very dated. The following post from "Welcome to Earth, Spaceboy," has a reference to "My Humps." How quaint! Life was so much simpler in the halcyon days of 2005.

your bff,
Armin

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(originally posted 12/20/2005)

Senses
Current mood: sleepy

Sure i've got the basic five: sight, hearing, touch, taste, telekinesis... but I was deprived the most basic of all animal senses, smell. Now it's not like I'm completely devoid of olfactory prowess, it's just that I have to really try hard to smell. The rest of you out there are just sitting around and smelling stuff constantly, having a grand old time, while I actually have to concentrate on it. For instance, i can't smell and do algebra at the same time; it just requires too many neurons to run both programs in this feeble windows 95 virus ridden brain of mine.

I guess it's not really the same as being blind or deaf and I completely understand why no one gives me change on the train when I wear my sandwich board that says "Feed the Smell-less," but there are certainly downfalls to my disability.

When I was a kid and someone would say, "Who farted?" I'd always have to pretend I smelled whatever they smelled. Now in my neighborhood, the rule was "whoever smelt it, dealt it," but I recall at least three occasions when that adage was overruled by the "whoever didn't smell it, dealt it" ammendment of 1985. So seven out of ten times, I was safe by admitting I didn't smell anything, but if some crafty son of a bitch kid would shout out, "Whoever didn't smell it, dealt it!" i was surely going to eat lunch alone. Would you play russian roulette with that bullet? I think not.

The safest thing was to be the second person to say he smelled something. Of course I'd be conservative about my reaction, always a notch less disgusted than the original smeller, and always much more vague about what I was smelling ("yeah,, ewww, what is that? it smells like something, i can't tell what that is"), and hopefully one more kid would agree that he smelled something and I would be safely nestled between two accurate affirmations and could skip home gleefully, my disability (and identity as the flatulator) undetected.

But being the second to affirm the smell had its pitfalls too. Say you were in a large group, one kid says he smells something, you agree that you smell something, but are very vague about it, and the rest of the fifteen kids don't smell a damn thing. Well you are now caught in a lie my friend, and that's called perjury.

In those cases, I'd have to fatten my lie with details to make it more believable. So if little Billy said, "Eww you guys smell that? I think I'm going to throw up!" I'd follow with something like, "Yeah, that is gross. It smells like three to five over ripe bananas floating on a raft of fragrant white pine in the middle of a miasmic Alabaman bayou during a crisp harvest moon night after the rains." Needles to say, this route was never my first option.

The point is, I would dread whenever kids said they smelled things. And this didn't stop until college when I met friends that loved me unconditionally and I felt safe enough one tearful night to come out of the closet and say "I am without smell."

This lack of smell thing affects me in my adulthood too. As we all know, attraction is based on pheremones, so the girl of your dreams has to find the way to your heart through your nasal passage. Of course, mine has a detour sign up. So instead of finding true love based on a girl's pheremones, I have to judge my attraction based on her tits and ass. So ladies, just remember, if you're at a club and some guy is staring at your humps, think first... he might be smell-less. Don't be so quick to judge; he can't smell you enough to know if he thinks you are his soulmate. This is the only way for those of us in a dark scentless world. And would it kill you to drop a damn quarter in his cup?