That’s right: AIM was so fertile and life-giving that we invented subtweeting to use it. But we never actually said that outright instead, we hinted at their sins and petty slights through suggestion and understatement. (We didn’t have Hamilton back then-I shudder to imagine what 2008 would’ve been like if we had.) From Brand New or Taking Back Sunday if you were pissed at your crush.Īnd then there were, sometimes concurrently with the song lyrics, the pained, cryptic, and egocentric recountings of the emotional trials of the day. Often they consisted of the quotation of vitally important song lyrics: from The Postal Service, from Dashboard Confessional, from blink-182, from Green Day, from The Beatles (only after Across the Universe came out), from RENT and Spring Awakening and The Last Five Years. They might have a succinct description of our emotional state. “What were they like?” As thunderous piano-accompanied art songs were to the sad young men of Romantic Germany, so were status messages to us. And iconic alert noises played at certain actions: the door-opening squeak when someone logged on, the door-closing click when they logged off, the boodleoop for every new message. (Since we didn’t have smartphones back then, its desktop-delimited-ness was self-explanatory.) You could set lengthy status messages with animated icons in them. It was like Gchat or iMessage, but you could only do it from a desktop computer. But when we invented it, we didn’t have text messages, we didn’t have Snapchat, we didn’t have group chats or Instagram DMs or school-provided Gmail accounts. That thing you know how to do, that cerebellum-wracking attentiveness to every character of the text message and what it might mean- we invented that. We were the first generation to spend two hours typing at our closest friends instead of finishing our homework, parsing and analyzing and worrying over “ u were so funny in class today” or “ nah lol youre pretty cool.” The words and the alert sounds swirl around you and you know how to read them and hear them because our culture-that we made-taught you how. You walk around in habitats of text, pop-up cathedrals of social language whose cornerstone is the rectangle in your pocket. “I’m just glad Livejournal isn’t still a thing - he can avoid the embarrassment of posting poetry or poorly translated lines from Amelie, which we never watched together.”Īt press time, Harwood finally landed on setting his preferred away message as his Tinder bio, and was seen swiping right endlessly, alone in the dark, listening to Fevers and Mirrors.You kids don’t understand. “I actually muted him on all social media after he changed his profession on Facebook to be ‘Professionally alone for all eternity,’ and then put on LinkedIn under ‘Achievements,’ ‘Winner of all the best deception and the clever cover story awards,’” said Larson on a date with her new boyfriend. Indeed, Harwood later posted an Instagram story of himself clumsily playing “Hands Down” by Dashboard Confessional on an acoustic guitar. “Then he posted a #tbt on Instagram - even though it’s Monday - of him at some show buying a T-shirt for his ex… I guess hoping she’d see it? The caption just said, ‘Don’t you see, don’t you see.’ I don’t know what he’s trying to do, but I doubt it’s gonna work out how he hopes.” “He tweeted, ‘And with my one last gasping breath I’d apologize for bleeding on your shirt 6/28 <3,’ but deleted it almost immediately,” Kerner said. Harwood’s roommate Mara Kerner, closely following Harwood’s social media activity during his introspection, confirmed his attempts to replicate the AIM away message function. But now, I don’t know… how do I make sure everyone, especially her, knows that I don’t want to feel this way forever? A dead letter marked returned to sender.” “I needed to set an away message on AIM with Cursive lyrics, or maybe Say Anything lyrics - or maybe even a combination of the two. “Sam and I dated for three wonderful months… and after the breakup, I knew there was really only one way to get my feelings out there,” said Harwood. Recently single 31-year-old Alexander Harwood is reportedly longing today for the era in which grief and sorrow was solely expressed through away messages on AOL Instant Messenger.
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