Add me to your Buddylist

You know in middle school when technology class consisted of countless hours of learning to type with Mavis Beacon or Type To Learn 2?! Well if you are anything like me you know that these were the most worthless programs as everyone knows the real way to learn to type is with AIM (or A-I-M if you prefer). The countless hours you spent after school during fifth and sixth grade logging onto your AIM account with some ridiculous name like ElephantsR2Cute or QTpa2T and chatting with your "best friends" on your buddylist. It was always clear in technology class who the popular kids were (they probably aimed the most people) as they were always the best typers. During the time when you weren't chatting that girl you sometimes saw at lunch or the boy you had the biggest crush on ever but were too afraid to talk to in real life, you were sprucing up your AIM account.

Everyone knows how important it was to have the best combination of background color, font color, and actual font. One could spend hours working on these settings in order to make their conversations look the cutest. If you weren't concerned with these colorful details, chances are you were updating your profile. From my own experience the most popular topics for the profile were some type of song lyrics, most likely something similar to Dashboard Confessional's "Hands Down," a list of inside jokes you had with your friends half of which were made up so you would seem more popular, and finally a list of shoutouts to your friends, aka a list of your friends and some yearbook like comment. "Rachel-you are such a good friend I love going to school with you. LYLAS." And finally, you spent the most amount of time picking out your buddy icon. Everyone knows that the icons provided by AOL were not adequte, so you logged onto your browser and searched for the ideal icon. If you were a girl, chances are you were after that perfect doll or avatar icon that either had cherries or some dumb quote about love. If you were a boy it was probably something that resembled SouthPark or an attractive girl.

Now you've got it, your icon, font, and profile are all in perfect sync, optimized for the perfect chatting experience. However, all of those hours of work are worthless unless you have the right buddies on your list. After all, who can see all of the hard work you've put into your account unless you have at least 100 buddies. No your buddies aren't always your best friends, because who has 100 best friends? That's why you add your friends to the "Best Friends" list but also have a separate list for girls and boys. The headings for these probably look like "GURLZ" and "BOIIZ" because while you do know how to type, you clearly don't know how to spell. Furthermore, you always had your crush on your list and would get so excited when the door opened next to their name.

While we are embarrassed to look back on this obsessive precursor to our Myspace days, at least we can determine that we are typing our college essays quickly as a result of all of the "lol"s "rofl"s and "itjy"s you typed at age 10.