A Bad Idea I'm About to Do by Chris Gethard Page A

I’d drive over there and take night classes. I was tired all the time.”

    He graduated in three years. Then he went on to get two master’s degrees and an MBA. He recently received his PhD. Needless to say, my complaints about wanting to leave school were not the sort of thing I could talk to my dad about.
    The next person I turned to was my usually reliable brother Gregg. After I told him how I was feeling, he drove to Rutgers and hung out in my dorm.
    â€œSo dude, what’s going?” he asked upon arriving.
    â€œMan, I don’t know. I don’t think this place is for me . . . at all,” I answered.
    â€œCool,” he said. “So how many girls live on your floor?”
    Gregg’s priorities were clearly not with helping his little brother.
    With all of these factors lined up and pushing me into a very depressed corner, I did what anyone who was eighteen in the late ’90s would do—I retreated to the Internet. Specifically, to AOL’s Instant Messenger program.
    At any moment I wasn’t in class (my favorite that semester was “Dinosaurs,” because every time it met, the professor would grab at his hair in frustration and shout, “They’re just birds,” over and over again) or at the dining hall (where my favorite meal—one that I ate at least once and sometimes twice a day—was four separate bowls of Cocoa Krispies, a plate of cheese fries, and copious amounts of cranberry juice), I was online, talking to friends from high school and my family. I was doing anything and everything to avoid dealing with the reality of my actual existence, so naturally I spent hours sitting at my computer.
    My name online was “Framsky.” And “Framsky,” probably due to the fact that it’s much easier to hide emotions in typed messages on a screen as opposed to actual conversations with real people, wasn’t half as sad or miserable as “Chris” was. “Framsky” was getting me through many days, and even more nights. While
other kids were going to dorm-sponsored get-to-know-you events, I could sit online and tell my high school friends how lame things like that were, and not have to admit that it was my own social anxiety keeping me from participating. When people invited me to parties, I could act busy in front of the computer screen instead of owning up to the fact I felt too uncomfortable in my own skin to do anything around that many people.
    I would even IM with the kid who lived directly across the hall from me, a ridiculously tall half-Asian kid named Andy. I’m still not sure why Andy and I didn’t just walk across the hall and hang out. A typical conversation looked like this:
    FRAMSKY: how’s it going?
    ANDY: I have no friends here
    FRAMSKY: me either
    ANDY: brb, i am gonna go stare at the Indian girl with the rotten tomato tits
    Such were the types of high-minded, empowering conversations that served as life rafts, keeping one’s psyche afloat.
    That is, until the day “Framsky” was taken away from me.
    One December night at about eight, I got a message from an acquaintance of mine named Rob. Rob went to Princeton, but was a friend of some friends I had met at Rutgers.
    â€œChris!” his message read. “WATCH OUT!”
    Before I could even finish typing and sending the word “why,” over thirty strangers randomly messaged me with no provocation. While I was trying to sort out what Rob’s message was about, and what the strange feeding frenzy of online messages was for, they all began to “warn” me. As any avid IM user knows, too many warnings means you get booted from the program. I was cut off.

    Sitting there on a Friday night, lonely and depressed, a Fat Bitch working its way through my intestinal tracts, I found myself unable to access my precious Instant Messenger. Suddenly, a rage known only to those with Irish blood raised by a melodramatic mother in a