P365 Day 211: In which I talk about people on the Interwebs

Guess who got her "go outside to the screened-in porch by herself" privileges revoked yesterday? Yep. Joe-Kitty decided to climb the screen and made it to about Paul's height (6'5") before he was able to get her down. Bad, bad kitty. (Those claws? Clean but deadly.)

If you haven't seen Bryce Donovan's latest "The Bryce is Write" column (You see what they did there? Huh? Huh? Bryce? Write? It's a funny play on words!), check it out here. It's about this website called Chat Roulette, where you can video/audio chat with random strangers, roulette-style. His advice? Turn off your audio and video, then go "people-watching."

I tried it yesterday afternoon around 4 p.m. and flipped through a few people before landing on an unabashed nosepicker. I figured nothing could top that, so I quit and left Bryce a comment. Last night, I told Paul about Chat Roulette and tried to get him to try it, but he has no patience for things such as that.

So, at about 2 a.m., completely under the influence of Ambien, I went through the same routine: turned off my video/audio and just flipped through random people. I was surprised by the number of ... uh, exhibitionists (Paul said, "What did you expect at 2 in the morning?") ... but fortunately, there's a "report activity" button. (Aside: I also landed on a dude who had a gun to his head and was holding a sign that read, "Convince me not to do it." I didn't feel like doing any convincing, so I went on to the next person. Hope that turned out OK for him.)

Then I landed on this dude who didn't seem to care if I had video/audio because he had to tell me this story Right Now about another person he'd seen on Chat Roulette. (I won't repeat the story. I can't repeat the story.) Anyway, we struck up a conversation, with his friend and his friend's girlfriend chiming in at various points, and — long story short — he's my Facebook friend now! :D

See, not all people on the Internet are bad. I mean, plenty of people on the Internet are bad, but if you have some common sense, you can figure those people out rather quickly. I was doing a little math and realized I met Paul online 13 years ago this May. Thirteen!

"If you have some common sense" aside, I admit I'd be pretty pissed if I found out my 16-year-old daughter met up at an arcade (ahh, love) with some dude she'd met on the Internet, which is precisely why it took me a couple of years to level with my parents about how I met Paul.

And I can guarantee if we'd gone the eHarmony route, we never would have ended up together because we were — and still are, in some ways — so different. (If you know us both, skim through the list of 29 dimensions [OK, they say 29 then list 32] and count how many ways we're alike. Not many, right? Yeah, that's what I thought.)

But, hey, we're coming up on our 8th anniversary, so it all worked out in the end. Online people rock! Paul and I rock! Go us!