I have been using chat rooms and other written forms of electronic communication for seven years now, but every now and again the openness of the medium makes me giddy. I enter a chat room: what does that mean? I can be connected to the forum for hours without saying anything. I can evoke images of entering quietly or with a big cape-swirling flourish. I can write myself as a squirrel-fox which pads in and curls up around the ankle of a complete stranger, or enter with a huge sword and jovially hew a friend in half with it.

I know. I gross myself out with the Dungeons and Dragons of it too. But I love the freedom of it, and the possibilities for play. These things are still in the pidgin-culture phase-- customs surrounding this communication are still made up as we go along-- so there's none of those restraining social structures that bug me.

I'm waiting, of course, for the day when we'll all have avatars to represent ourselves visually. Though I don't know... if I had known it was coming I wouldn't have wished for TV and the way it makes everything be about appearance.