On the Internet, No One Has to Know You’re Insane

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While the details of the deception are in many ways quite different, the mental disturbance and the emotional rape described in this LA Weekly article are far, far, far too painfully familiar to me.

A bit of background, so that the following excerpts make sense: The author’s friend Audrey became friends over the ‘net with a woman named Janna, who introduced Audrey to a man named Jesse. Over the next two years, Audrey and Jesse fell in love, helping each other through tragedy after tragedy — all over the ‘net, without ever meeting. Before they got a chance to meet, Jesse suddenly dies from liver cancer. Some time afterwards, Janna comes out to visit Audrey…

This past February, I got a phone call from Tania. She told me two things, one I didn’t know, one I realized I’d known for a very long time. The first was that Janna was in Los Angeles. She had arrived the previous Saturday and was in town for a week.

Then Tania tells me that she and her boyfriend Will had been doing some digging. And man, they were intensive. They spent two whole days on the Internet, doing stuff with Google that I didn’t know was possible. They got piles of backup, but the instant she said it, I knew down to my toes that it was true.

There is no Jesse.

There never was a Jesse.

Jesse never existed.

Ever.

Jesse was supposed to be a volunteer fireman in Colorado. It’s not hard to get a list of every voluntary fireman working in the state of Colorado. His name never appears.

He’d supposedly had surgery at a teaching hospital in Colorado. A quick check confirmed that this hospital had never performed any kind of operation on anyone. Ever.

They checked the death records in Colorado for the day he died. Nothing. So, they checked that week. Nothing. That month. Nothing. That year. Guess what?

Nothing. And they had more. Piles of stuff. This guy should show up in about a dozen places, and he doesn’t. Neither does his supposed son or his purported ex-wife.

Which means that Janna, the woman who was Jesse’s friend, who met him years ago when she hired him to do some work for her, who visited him in the mental home, who filled Audrey in on the details of his funeral, who’s staying in the house with Audrey as we speak . . . It means that Janna is

completely

absolutely

one hundred percent

out of her goddamn mind.

Not just a liar, but bugfuck crazy. Because this has been going on for close to two years, and it’s clearly not about money. This sounds like some sort of weird variant on Munchausen syndrome by proxy, the mental illness in which a parent induces an illness in a child so he or she can be the beneficiary of sympathy.

Audrey’s friends get together to discuss the situation.

I suggested a fairly direct plan of action, and people hemmed and hawed and went back and forth. It was drastic, and it was decisive, but there was some notion that Audrey should be allowed to decide what to do, as though she could possibly process the information we had and make a calm, rational decision in the moment. I pointed out that when someone’s being raped — and this was, indeed, emotional rape — you don’t ask them if they’d like you to pull the rapist off. You make that decision for them and face the consequences later.

The strange thing about something like this, about an encounter with a genuine monster, is that our minds tend to default to what’s normal, to what we know. We found ourselves talking about the situation as though Audrey had simply made friends with an eccentric person we didn’t like. Surely, it’s Audrey’s business whether or not she wants to be friends with Janna, isn’t it? Then someone would remember that a potentially dangerous lunatic was in the house with our friend.

An intervention is staged, Audrey is called away and informed of the situation by one group of friends while another confront Janna, who leaves.

As horrible as this article is to read for most people, imagine actually being in Audrey’s place — that’s essentially the situation I’m in. In our case, however, we didn’t have friends who could see what was going on and intervene on our behalf. We had to discover the deception for ourselves, and we’re learning how to deal with it on our own.

Of course, some days, the thought that makes it most bearable is simply that the people who live their lives like this, taking advantage of other people’s trust, are putting themselves at risk.

There’s also this — someday, Janna will prey on someone who is not capable, and strong, and possessed of smart, strong friends who care about her. And that person will snap, and Janna will end up in a ditch somewhere. Call it karma, or call it the natural progression of things, but Janna will end up her own victim. It would be immensely satisfying to witness it, or at least read about it in the paper, but we never will. You just have to learn to accept that these things happen, and that you rarely get to be there for the big payback. Just trust that it’s coming, and take what solace you can from that.

At the end of the article, a photo is posted of Janna, as a warning to others she might prey upon. We thought we were doing the right thing when we took the opposite tack — removing our predator’s name from my weblog, changing her name on any entry that mentioned her, and hiding any photos with her in them. Some days we wonder, though. Are we doing the right thing by trying to avoid damaging the life of someone who used to be a friend, and who is apparently suffering some form of mental illness? Or are we merely endangering those who still know her and who she may be spinning a whole new web for?

Neither possibility really makes me comfortable.

At the insistence of her friends, Audrey hasn’t contacted Janna to confront her, and she’s not pursuing legal action (if it’s even possible). The drama has to end. She has to leave it behind and move forward. I hope she can. I think she can. But she has the impulse to try to make sense of it, to try to make it better. She told me she wanted to stop Janna not for her own wounded feelings, but so she doesn’t prey on anyone else. I suggested that if she really wanted to be selfless, she should help Bosnian refugees, or orphans in Darfur. She needs to let go.

This is a struggle we’re still dealing with. We’ve cut off all contact, mainly because we know that no matter how many times we ask, we’re never going to get the most important question — for God’s sake, why?!? — answered. At times, we just want to do our best to forget the whole thing. At other times, we want to shout her name from the rooftops, take out ads in papers detailing what happened, warning people to look out for her. We don’t know what the right answer is. She hurt us, and she could very easily hurt others later on. But how can we warn others without opening ourselves up to more drama, more trauma, and more stress?

I’m tired of the stress. It’s time for it to stop.

And I hate her for what she did to us.

We’re working on moving past what happened, on letting it slide away into the past and continue on with our lives, and it’s better every day. Eventually, it will be a distant, unpleasant memory. I just wish that day was here already.

Why We Had to Move

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Why We Had to Move

Why We Had to Move, originally uploaded by djwudi.

After returning home from Hawaii (no, those pictures aren’t done yet, I’m just busy with work and school), Prairie and I found out we had to move (here’s my post and here’s Prairie’s on the debacle).

This shot is of what used to be our cute little apartment.

We’ve got a new cute little apartment now, sure, but…(sigh)…this one was our first. Not so cute now, is it?

Misogyn•E

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With more marketing materials coming out for Pixar‘s upcoming movie Wall•E, it’s becoming quite clear that they are continuing with a trend that I’ve mentioned previously (briefly here, and in more depth here) of being extremely male centered in creating characters for their animated films.

At first, I thought there might be a little bit of hope, as while the main character is given a male name, it is a robot — and, further, as there apparently is little to no spoken dialogue in the film, one might (at this point) argue that Wall•E is technically sexless. Admittedly, it’s a bit dodgy, given our tendency to anthropomorphize mechanical devices, and robots in particular tend to be seen as male (seriously, has anyone ever referred to R2-D2 as a ‘she’?). Still, it was a possibility.

Then I started poking around the Buy n Large website that Pixar has set up to help promote the film. In Wall•E’s universe, Buy n Large is apparently the company that makes Wall•E, along with a host of other products, and there’s a lot of cute in jokes and jabs at today’s tech companies hidden (and not so hidden — just check out the disclaimer text at the bottom of the home page) in the website.

On Jason Kottke’s recommendation, I bounced over to the ‘Robotics’ section of the site and started browsing through the four robot models available for the home (no permalink available, thanks to the all-Flash presentation: click ‘Robotics’ on the top menu bar, then choose ‘Robot Models’ from the left hand navigation). Here’s a brief rundown of the four models that Buy n Large offers:

  • Sall•E: The Buy n Large Vaccubot. “Tired of cleaning the stairs and struggling to reach under your sofa to vacuum? With the BnL SALL•E Vaccubot, cleaning dirty carpets and drapes yourself can be a thing of the past.”

  • Gar•E: The Buy n Large Yardbot. “The GAR•E is ready to handle the most time-consuming and difficult aspects of keeping a yeard in tip-top shape, from lawn trimming and hedge shaping to barbecue cleaning and maintenance.”

  • Nanc•E: The Buy n Large Nannybot. “…with the new NANC•E Nannybot you can rest easily, knowing that every aspect of your child’s health and happiness has been addressed.”

  • Wend•E: The Buy n Large Washbot. “With the WEND•E, washing, drying, folding, and putting away your clothes is a thing of the past.”

  • And, of course, though it’s not listed on the site (or at least not this portion of the site), there’s Wall•E, the garbage collector.

Really, this isn’t even subtle. The traditional “women’s work” of cleaning, laundry, and taking care of the children is assigned to Sally, Wendy, and Nancy, while Gary goes out to do the yardwork and Wally picks up the garbage, typically “men’s chores.” These are stereotypes dating back decades — do we really need to be reinforcing them this obviously in today’s family films?

I also skimmed over the information collected on Wall•E’s Wikipedia page to get a better idea of what the movie’s about. Here‘s John Lasseter’s summary of the film while presenting to Disney investors:

WALL-E is the story of the last little robot on Earth. He is a robot that his programming was to help clean up. You see, it’s set way in the future. Through consumerism, rampant, unchecked consumerism, the Earth was covered with trash. And to clean up, everyone had to leave Earth and set in place millions of these little robots that went around to clean up the trash and make Earth habitable again.

Well, the cleanup program failed with the exception of this one little robot and he’s left on Earth doing his duty all alone. But it’s not a story about science fiction. It’s a love story, because, you see, WALL-E falls in love with Eve, a robot from a probe that comes down to check on Earth, and she’s left there to check on and see how things are going and he absolutely falls in love with her.

So much for the possibility that, despite the name, Wall•E might be sexless. Once again, the main character in a Pixar film is male, and any female characters are secondary. Furthermore, it sounds like this Eve character isn’t one that will immediately appeal to most little girls. According to Andrew Stanton:

…WALL-E falls head over heals with a probot named EVE. Now, Wall-E’s feelings aren’t reciprocated because, well, she has no feelings. She’s a robot, cold and clinical. WALL-E is the one who has evolved over time and garnered feelings. So in the end, it’s gonna be WALL-E’s pursuit to win EVE’s heart, and his unique appreciation of life to become mankind’s last hope to rediscover its roots.

What’s been frustrating so far is simply that in many of Pixar’s prior films, there’s no particular reason why one or another of their characters couldn’t be female rather than male — would Ratatouille have been any less well done if he were a she? Would the rescue of the ant colony be less spectacular if Julia Louis-Dreyfus had voiced Flik against Dave Foley’s Prince Atta?

As I’ve said before, I don’t at all deny that, with few exceptions, Pixar’s films are incredibly well done — they’re technological marvels, they’re written as gorgeously as they are rendered, and they’re some of the only family-friendly fare that’s out there that has real heart and is genuinely worth watching. I’ve enjoyed most all of them (with Cars being a notable exception). However, it continues to be rather disappointing that they’ve yet to do anything with a strong, central female main character, and it’s doubly distressing that the available information on Wall•E is traditionalist and very obviously sexist.

This looks to be the third time running (following Cars and Ratatouille) that I’ll wait to rent Pixar’s latest, rather than sending any of my money their way via the theater.

Lastly, a bit of a disclaimer: to be honest, I believe misogyny to be an overly strong word for what’s happening here. However, when searching for synonyms for ‘sexist‘ or ‘sexism‘, it was only one of two words that would mimic Pixar’s ‘-e’ naming strategy, and while ‘bigotry‘ is probably technically closer, it didn’t carry quite the emotional impact that I wanted for the title.

Addendum: Here’s something I dug out of my del.icio.us bookmarks — Washington Post guest columnist Jen Chaney raising some of the same questions I do.

Pixar has done it again. With “Ratatouille,” the studio has created another dazzling, clever, uplifting adventure, this time about a French rodent with a flair for food preparation. But Pixar also has done something else again: It’s delivered yet another kiddie-centric piece of entertainment with a male in the starring role.

I give Pixar much credit for breathing life into some gutsy, admirable females. Helen Parr of “The Incredibles” not only keeps her household in order, she can stretch her limbs to limits even the uber-flexible Madonna couldn’t reach. Sally Carrera in “Cars” is the spunky owner of her own business. And in “Ratatouille,” Colette (voiced by Janeane Garofalo) makes an impassioned speech about how, as the only woman working in the kitchen at the chi-chi Gusteau’s, she is tired of getting pushed around by all the men. She is femme, hear her roar.

But still, in the end, all of these women wind up playing love interest — and second fiddle — to the heroes.

Soylent Cheese

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Last week sometime, Prairie and I were flopped in bed, watching some silly sitcom before we faded out for the night. During one of the commercial breaks, we heard the following:

Of course milk comes from cows, but we know that cheese comes from people…

Prairie and I looked at each other with identical horrified and amused expressions, and then spent the next few minutes laughing until our sides ached and our eyes were tearing up. Cheese comes from people? We just couldn’t get past it, and every time we started to calm down, one or the other of us would say, “cheese comes from people!” and we’d start laughing all over again.

The worst part was, we were laughing so hard that we had no idea what the rest of the commercial was about, or who it was for, so since then, we’ve just been hoping to run across the “cheese comes from people” commercial again so that we’d have some idea what they were talking about. Prairie found it last night, and apparently it’s an ad for Kraft cheese…unfortunately, a horribly written ad. This one just slipped right past the editors before it went on the air!

Thankfully, we’re not the only ones amused by this.

Facebook: MySpace Without the Pain

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While I often, and not entirely tongue-in-cheek, spout off that “friends don’t let friends use MySpace,” it’s no secret that I have my own MySpace page and do occasionally (though not often) check in. Mostly, this is because I’ve got a few friends and acquaintances who seem to have been sucked into that particular hell and I have no other reliable way of keeping up with them, but be that as it may, I’m no stranger.

Some time ago, Facebook opened their doors to the general public, and while I signed up for an account a few months ago, I just really started playing around with the site over the past few days. I have to admit, while I’m not a huge Social Networking junkie (and don’t plan on becoming one), Facebook is pretty slick — the same basic idea as MySpace or any other social networking site, but done in a way that doesn’t leave me feeling like I’ve just spent a few hours being beaten with an ugly stick…or, given the number of times MySpace throws errors at me, an ugly stick carved by blind, palsied, one-armed, three-fingered hyperactive toddlers.

Yes, that analogy completely fell apart, but I think you get my point.

As a quick comparison, here’s a look at the primary pages of the sites that users who are logged in to the system see. Keep in mind, these aren’t the splash pages for the general public — these are for people who’ve already set up an account and are signed in.

MySpace Front Page

I’ve color-coded the screen shot: red highlighted sections are ads for something not directly MySpace related, orange highlighted sections are for items that are (at least arguably) part of the MySpace network. Essentially, the entirety of the first page is advertising — it’s not until you click the tiny ‘home’ link in the menubar (one of three in the header) that you get to your personal page.

MySpace Page Two

Once again, red is for external ads, orange for internal ads, and I’ve used yellow for the “please sucker your friends into joining” box. Around half of the page (or slightly over half, given all the whitespace) devoted to advertising in one form or another.

And this is all just the site default pages — this doesn’t even begin to go into the atrocities that people’s personal profile pages become after they’ve played with every little piece of ‘bling’ that can be added, the horrendous embedded music that far too many people put into their profiles, or the ubiquitous “sorry, we can’t code properly” error messages that pop up as you try to navigate around the site.

In comparison, here’s how Facebook greets their users:

Facebook Main Page

Sure, there’s advertising — one banner ad on the right for an external service, and one section of the main News Feed showing what events Facebook is tracking that are popular in Seattle. I almost chose a different color for the orange block, as where MySpace’s ads are completely generic, Facebook is at least tying their “look what else we do” advertising to my location. The rest of the page is given to actually showing me information: any waiting friend requests or messages in the sidebar (along with their own “invite your friends” box — the same idea as MySpace’s, but far less intrusive), and the larger central section showing me my friends updates.

Not only is the website itself far better designed, making it drastically easier to navigate (and to put up with), but the extensibility of the Facebook ‘applications’ (small, externally hosted plugins) has allowed me to aggregate nearly all of my various online presences onto my profile page. My weblog posts are automatically copied into Facebook’s ‘notes’, and my LibraryThing ‘reading’ tag, Upcoming events, Flickr photos and Last.fm music tracking are all embedded in the page. All in all, it’s more or less ‘one stop shopping’ for my ‘net presence.

Sure, it’s not perfect — though at the moment, the only annoyances I’ve run into have been with some of the third-party application plugins, rather than with Facebook itself — but as far as social networking goes, this is the first I’ve seen that I’m actually fairly impressed by.

Fall Quarter ’07

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A little birdie reminded me that I hadn’t said anything about this yet…

This quarter’s schedule:

  • M-F 10 am – 11 am: PHI120 — Introduction to Logic, Dr. Vishnyakova
  • M-F 11 am – 12 pm: ANT201 — Physical Anthropology, Dr. Abé
  • M-F 12 pm – 1 pm: SPA101 — Spanish, Prof. Bernardo (Bernhard)
  • Tu/Th 2:30 pm – 6:30 pm: Tutoring at the Loft

And, most M/W/F, a 3pm – 10pm shift at my ‘real job’ selling cameras. Another busy quarter, but that’s pretty typical.

Besides, barring unexpected catastrophes, I’ll be walking across a stage and graduating with my AA degree this spring. There’s a point to all this after all! ;)

Catching Up with September

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A few snippets from the past month…

  • Dealing with trying to get the ‘net and phone moved over, in Prairie’s words:

    Us (On Sept. 4th): Is there any way to speed up the process? This move was unplanned, and we couldn’t call you before now to set things up.

    Them: Yes, we’ll have an installer out there on the 21st. How would that be?

    Us: Would it be possible to have anyone out here sooner than that? You see, the move was unplanned.

    Them: Yes, we’ll have an installer out there on the 21st. How would that be?

    Us: Yes, but could you make it sooner? We’ll be without phone and Internet for a month by then.

    Them: Yes, we’ll have an installer out on the 21st. How would that be?

    At which point we just gave up and agreed that the 21st would be lovely…

  • Prairie’s ‘before‘ shots and my ‘after‘ shots of the new apartment.

  • A few shots of me and my parents as they stopped by in Seattle on their way back up to Alaska after picking up the Turtle (their new RV).

And now, we have one last night of ‘summer’ before school starts tomorrow morning. Yeesh. Weren’t we supposed to be able to relax in here at some point?

Alive Again…

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After twenty-two days, we’re finally up and running in the new apartment — internet and phone are both finally working as they should.

This took far, far too long.

But, it’s done, and we can finally start paying attention to and staying in contact with the world again.

So.

What’ve we missed?

Offline Time

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As Prairie’s mentioned, work on moving into the new apartment continues, and we’re making progress. I’ve had to work just about every day (though I was able to get most of yesterday off to help), and Prairie and her family crew have done the lion’s share of the work so far, so in this case saying that “we” are making progress is really only strictly true for certain values of “we”. But still…progress is being made. At least I’ve got a day off tomorrow to pitch in all day long.

One side effect of all this is that both Prairie and I are going to be essentially out of touch for the next two weeks or so. As we use Speakeasy for our ‘net and our phone connection through VoIP, we need to get that transferred over to the new apartment…and, unfortunately, Speakeasy says that that can take up to two weeks. Not what I was hoping for, but pretty unavoidable, as all of this has happened so quickly.

We do have our laptop with WiFi access, so we may be able to check in from time to time, but it’s pretty much safe to assume that we probably won’t be reachable via e-mail or phone for the next two weeks, and certainly won’t be responding to messages in a timely manner. Not ideal, but that’s what it is.

Upheaval

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The move is in progress — tons of boxes filled with crap floating from one apartment to the other, and all sorts of unfun disarray and nastiness. Ugh. Moving’s stressful enough when it’s anticipated and planned, but having to suddenly dive full-force into it with no advance notice is horrendous.

It should be pretty obvious that given the situation, I’m not checking in with much of anything online right now, and likely won’t be for at least a few days (we still haven’t set up switching the ‘net and phone service to the new apartment). All things come with time….