Your Internet Or Mine?

This afternoon I came home early from school -- well, earlier than normal for me. I walked into my building and found my downstairs neighbor sitting on his couch watching TV with his door wide open. “Uh, hey,” I said, passing by as if this sort of thing were perfectly normal. And maybe it is. I mean, I’m rarely there in the middle of the day, maybe this is just how shit goes down. I already know the dude has issues with doors.

Anyway, I managed to unlock my apartment while juggling bags of groceries and had just greeted the kitty when I heard my neighbor’s voice behind me. “Would you mind if I used your internet?” he asked frantically. And despite the fact that I’d just walked in the fucking door, despite the fact that I have dial-up and using “my internet” is a chore even for me, despite the fact that I often see him hanging out at the coffee shop around the corner where there’s complimentary high-speed internet access, despite the fact that this guy occasionally knocks on my door to frantically ask if he can use my phone and then proceeds to sit around my apartment for 20 minutes at a time casually chatting with his friends and making plans to meet up with them later, I figured this must be some sort of internet emergency, so in he came.

“I signed up for match.com,” he explained with his characteristic sense of urgency, pulling up the website on my internet. “I’ve been emailing with this guy. Look, he’s really cute,” he said, calling me over. The guy didn’t strike me as particularly cute or un-cute, but I did note that he’s 47 whereas my neighbor is a twenties-ish college student.

Plus match.com?! THIS is the fucking internet emergency? I mean, I guess I can sort of get that. There’s a strong possibility that I’d go out of my mind if I couldn’t check my email every few hours, but I don’t know that I’d go so far as to stalk my neighbors in the hopes of sustaining a budding internet romance.

As almost anyone will tell you, the internet is a sketchy place to meet men. You're supposed to meet them at places like the grocery or the laundromat, which is why I was home from work early in the first place. (To do laundry, not to meet men.) Although my parents have a friend who met his wife at the very laundromat I patronize, there is about a 0% chance that I will meet the love of my life while doing laundry. My laundromat is frequented almost exclusively by men who are either A) gay or B) in the Navy, neither of which are really my type.

Today’s crowd was no exception. In fact, today’s laundry outing was fairly uneventful save the brief but terrifying moment of panic I experienced when I removed my long-time favorite pants -- pants I wore last week and wondered what the hell I was thinking when I decided not to buy them in every color they came in -- from the dryer and noticed that the care instructions directed me not to tumble dry them.

Don’t worry. They’re fine. And it's a good thing, too. I guaran-damn-tee you it'd be a lot easier to find a man than it would be to replace those pants.