Internet is complex, and so I have chosen to write my responses in essay form.
1. How often do you find that you stay online longer than you intended?
I like to use my iPhone in bathrooms. I’ve spent hours on the toilet not peeing. Sometimes it’s my own toilet. Sometimes I’m out in the world and I excuse myself to use the bathroom. I always tell myself five minutes. It’s never five minutes. I fall down a hole and the vanishing feels good. People think I’m dead. I like it.
I try to set rules around my Internet usage. The act of rule-setting means that I am probably an Internet addict. Like, people who aren’t addicts don’t need to set rules about things. They just do them.
Some of my rules include: 10 minutes of meditation before turning on phone or computer in the morning, no social media before noon, only 120 minutes on social media websites per day, only two tweets per day and only after seven p.m., Internet detox for twenty-four hours on weekend. I break them all daily.
2. Do you prefer the excitement of the Internet to intimacy with your partner?
Yes. Of course. Unless the partner is a virtual stranger upon whom I have projected a fantasy narrative and we are making out for the first time in a hotel room.
3. Do you neglect household chores to spend more time online?
When something real has to be done, like making the bed or paying a bill, I feel like it is going to kill me. Like, I feel that a cruel and oppressive mother is coming for me and the world is comprised of nothing but Sisyphean tasks, wherein you infinitely push a boulder up a hill and are infinitely crushed. One time I was hand washing underwear in the sink and then I got on Twitter and the sink overflowed and the neighbor downstairs, who just had a baby, sent the building manager up and the building manager busted in and I thought he was a serial killer. So, yes.
4. Does your work (or school work) suffer because of the amount of time you spend online?
My work is online.
5. Do you form new relationships with others online?
I would rather be on the Internet engaging with half-imaginary people in a fake way than in real life engaging with real people in a real way. Not that everything on the Internet is fake. I have forged some deep connections with people I’ve never met (or maybe I was connecting with myself—my own desire for who I wanted them to be) via the Internet. Sometimes I compare the IRL people in my life with the Internet people in my life and I always feel like, Why can’t the IRL people be more like the Internet people? This is maybe because real people aren’t pixelated. Their mistakes and annoyingness can’t be repurposed into a fantasy. I actually have to see the real people and be seen by them. If people never become real, it’s harder for them to disappoint you. That’s why the Internet is good for sad people. You can be with people without having to be with people.
6. Do others in your life complain to you about the amount of time you spend online?
It’s going to be the death of my main relationship. The person with whom I am in a primary relationship calls my phone my “boyfriend.” He becomes elated when the battery dies. One time he threatened to throw it out the window. He is way more concerned with the way I use the Internet to shut him out than anything I could do sexually with another person. I tell him that I am not shutting him out. I am shutting out reality. Unfortunately for him, he is real.
7. Do you become defensive or secretive when anyone asks you what you do online?
It’s more about the act of being online, itself, than what I am doing there. Everyone knows what I am doing there. I’m tweeting. It’s more about the bathroom thing. I will say to the person with whom I have a relationship “I have to poop.” And then I’m gone for the rest of the night.
Actually, one thing I am ashamed of is that I like “female friendly” porn. Like, I wish that I didn’t like “female friendly” porn. I wish that when I watched Xander Corvus eat “babysitter” Melanie Rios’s pussy, I wasn’t like, Omg he is so in love with her. Like, he has def been