rfmcdonald | [LINK] "Hotmail suicide" (Reply)

Many thanks to Erin for pointing me to Jason Richard's parody in NOW Toronto of Chandler Levack's mystifying "Facebook suicide" article. "Hotmail suicide" is a serious thing.

My name is Jason Richards, and I am a Hotmail whore.

I love Hotmail like a crystal meth addict loves crystal meth (an analogy I am qualified to make, as a functional crystal meth addict who consumes crystal meth like it's Crystal Lite).

My ideal Saturday night consists of a little Santana featuring Rob Thomas on the stereo, a bag of crystal meth, a Hotmail window open on my laptop, and me, nude, clicking refresh in feverish anticipation of a hot new email. Mmm, oh yeah, that's good, Internet. Just like that, yeah. Unzip my compressed folder. Give me a 40 per cent discount on Cialis. Stick it in my inbox like you mean it.

Now don't get me wrong -- I'm not exactly foreign to the iSocial me-networking applications. I maintain blogs on livejournal, Blogger, Tumblr, Geocities, Flim-flam, and Glurb. I do an unofficial vlog for myspacemusic.co.uk and host weekly crags for dipdive.com. I occasionally glog about men's formalwear for myflog.vlorp, and have live-blarted on numerous occasions for paulblartmallcop.com.

But I always come back to Hotmail.

[. . .]

With all this thinking about me, I had the sudden, unquenchable urge to escape myself. I fled my salon, holding my petticoat and ran through the snow, outside to a frozen pond, where I stared into my reflection, searching my own face for an answer. Eventually, it came to me.

I was terrified but resolved. I would do something courageous, controversial, borderline blasphemous, unthinkable and extraordinary in this modern day and age – but also beautiful, revolutionary, and profoundly heroic: I – yes, me – would pull the trigger. I would delete my Hotmail account. Little did I know, that would be easier said than done. The powers that be at Hotmail do everything they can to get you to stay.