Eulogy for an E-mail Address

 

I measure the phases of my life through e-mail addresses. When I first got on the ‘net, I opened up a free, web-based e-mail account at Hotmail. It was still new enough that I was able to acquire the all-alphabetic, correctly-spelled, handle of my choice. That e-mail account saw me through the tail end of junior high, through high school and all of its dramas, and partway through my first year of college, until I faked its death to shake off a persistent ex-boyfriend.

 

Retrospectively, I would have soon dropped “Snow Dreamer,” regardless of my early dating dramas, given that I was in the midst of my first New England winter. After having my hair freeze during the three-minute walk from the pool to my house, snow, and winter, became less the stuff of dreams, and more of dread. Regardless of the reason, my hotmail account fell by the wayside, just as the Chick Click phenomena was coming online. Again, I came in early enough in the game to make “Star Sweeper” my own, long before others were forced to lay to claim to pale imitations like “starsweeper78” or “staarsweeper.”

 

That particular alias didn’t last long for several reasons: One, the Ethernet at college had allowed me to create an identity on Instant Messenger and ICQ, and I didn’t feel like being someone as girly as “Star Sweeper.” That sort of thing tended to attract messages like:

 

RandomJerk2: “Are you hot?”

 

or

 

Creepboy69: “i lik your screen name. will u go out with me?”

 

Quickly, I began looking for a screen name that conveyed dangerous, yet appealing, berserker tendencies. I found one, and that particular handle has lasted longer now than “Snow Dreamer,” the innocent wishing of a fourteen year old girl, ever did. Secondly, I was just then getting into the world of real, person-to-person RPGs, as opposed to my solo adventures in Final Fantasy for the Super Nintendo. I thought, at the time, that the dangerous-appealing-berserker-tendencies-yet-cute screen name would go over better than something at Chick Mail, which folded shortly thereafter, anyway.

 

Eventually, for one of those exciting person-to person games, I created my first, real character. Her name was based on my own in a vain attempt to keep track of what I was supposed to answer to, in a Live Action game of forty. Meg Williams was born, and although she was eventually killed by a raging werewolf, I was able to resurrect her for a variety of purposes.

 

She was nasty, mean, conniving, wily, and dangerously intelligent. I set up an e-mail address for her, and let her be the voice for my larval forays into satire. If you browse through the archives here at Heartless Bitches International, you’ll come across a piece that the Supreme Bitch renamed “A Brave New Immodest Proposal,” but that I had originally called “On the Education of Women.” Although I composed the piece, Meg Williams wrote it. That’s her that you’re hearing, not me. She also came back in time to suggest some dating strategies, and to make dangerous suggestions at the shoe store.

 

“Wow… four inch heels. They make my legs look so long- oops!”

 

 

Meg Williams became the Perdita to my Agnes.

 

Now, Meg will become someone, something, that I speak of only in the past tense. Because Lycos, which purchased Angelfire a couple years back, is eliminating the service come May, which, while their prerogative, marks the final demise of Meg Williams, and the end of an era for me.

 

My sister used to write me at that account as she traveled across Europe; my boyfriend wrote me love letters to that address; friends sent their dramatic tales there. I was Meg Williams on Friday nights for years, and that e-mail address was the last reminder of both better and harder times for me.

 

And the funny thing is knowing what Meg Williams would say to someone like me:

 

“You are such a geek. I can’t believe you just wrote an eulogy for an e-mail address.”