Spookiness on the Internet

This picture is intended merely as a metaphor for the spookiness that is out there on the Internet, and has no basis in reality in my life or, I hope, in anyone else's.

Sleep eludes me.  It's pointless to lie awake and stare at the minute-by-minute movement of the clock on my cable box.  I wish I had something profound to share.

A crazy lady has been bugging me on Twitter and telling me I'm mean to old opeople and that I must be Judge Alex's wife and that Judge Alex hacked into some account of hers and continues to do so on a regular basis and she can tell all of this by his shaky voice and by mine, which she's never heard unless she's a person I know in my real life, in which case she would know I'm not married to Judge Alex or anyone else. She said all sorts of other crazy stuff. I told the crazy lady, who may not even be a lady, that I'm an eighteen-year-old and I want her to leave mealone. i think you can block people from twitter, can't you? I'll check it out. She probably lives in Wasilla, Alaska or something and is no danger to me, but I'll err on the side of caution.

I did have an experience I'm not supposed to discuss much, but i had communication online with a child predator when I was in eighth grade. I never gave him enough information to find him to locate me; I was only outed when the feds were using fake identities to out child predators, and they and I came into contact with the same one. My contact with him was perfectly innocent until he sent a lewd picture, at which time I deleted the particular email and MySpace account (this was inthe olden days). Six months later when the feds caught up with him, they showed up at my school. It was totally dramatic,  and the school tried to blame me for having violated district technology policy,  but I never contacted this guy or anyone else I wasn't authorized to contact using school computers.  It was all on a  home computer, and all the guy and I talked about was the LSAT until he sent the inappropriate picture, and I deleted the account.  I will admit  way after the fact that I used a proxy server to bypass the district's filter, but everyone I know was doing the same thing, and it was only to access mostly sites I needed for research that were blocked, and a few sites I wanted just for pleasure, but that were not even pG-13.  If it had been something truly wrong that I did, the fact that almost everyone else did it would not have excused it in anyway, but what I did was harmless. For all I know, others may have acccessed hard-core porn using the proxy servers. I think districts have a little better handle on who is accessing proxy servers now, but back then, they had no way of tracking it. Anyway,  I know from my past experience that bad guys lurk out there, but I'm a little more savvy now about avoiding them than I was then, even though back then, I did OK. I just should have let my parents know about the picture so they could have alerted the proper authorities, which might have averted the mid-day visit from the FBI at school.

(The school had a really tough time processing that I was never a suspect; the feds wanted to ensure that I wasn't victimized.  It took two agents a long time to convinced the district that I wasn't a suspected terrorist, which was your tax dollars and mine at work.)

Additionally, a quasi-celebrity and author, whom I will not name nor give out any key words that might trigger this in a google search, but Becca or Knotty might guess with a few cryptic terms such as eating disorder and evangelical Christianity, sent me a Tweet PM. It freaked me a bit, as I wasn't sure what this person was talking about, and I certainly don't want to he sued if this person thinks I said something that was inaccurate. I deleted myself as a Twitter follower of this person, which I hadn't been of this person for long. It spooked, me, though.  I'll change my password just in case I've been hacked and someone wrote something to her on my account. I was hacked once before. Then I start wondering if, in a really tired state,  I Tweeted the person a question or comment, and the PM back  to me was perfectly innocent.  Since I deleted the person, I don't think any Tweet I might have sent the person would show up now.   I don't think I do a lot of sleep-tweeting, though. I still wonder what brought it on, and I'm a little scared. part of the problem is that I really don't understand Twitter's workings all that well. I've never spent enough time on it to know anything but the most basic workings.

I have to leave to drive to my [unpaid] lab job at 7:30 this morning. I'll stay at my aunt's and uncle's house until Wednesday late afternoon. My good friend is coming then, and she'll be here until Sunday. We'll have silly times , which will get my mind off Internet scariness.

I'd rather not do my job asleep on my feet tomorrrow, although no one's life would depend on it if I did, as this lab does not let anyone's diagnosis rest on the opinion of an unpaid intern with no degree.

Happy Labor Day, everyone.