Tuesday, March 21, 2006

The MySpace Chronicles

Loyal readers know of me discovering my teenaged daughter on MySpace and secretly reading her blog there. One nice side benefit is I can read all of her friend's blogs too. It's like looking under your kid's bed and finding their diary, and the diaries of all of their friends. Young readers, let me tell you, there's not a parent on Earth who sees anything wrong with this. Let this be a warning. Once I was young and shaggy-haired and wearing my "The Who Maximum R&B" t-shirt with pride, thinking I would never be buzz-haired and wearing a tie; but guess, what, here I am, and one day you will be too.

At any rate, I was outed the other day when I got an email on MySpace from my own daughter, and the heading said, and I am not making this up: "UMMMM OMG." I had found her, thinking she would never find me. I have what I consider a professional MySpace page that basically just has a link back to here. I didn't think of it in the same category as a teenager's MySpace account, but there you go. We had a nice Afterschool Special talk about the dangers of giving out too much info on the 'net and then all was right with the world. She even asked me to be her "friend."

But naturally I had to say no, as I can't have people who like movies like "Peter Rottentail" and "Sex Machine" and "Black Mass" around my teenaged daughter. These worlds must forever be apart. Even in my own house, when my daughter saw me wearing my mint-new "Sex Machine" t-shirt courtesty of Christopher Sharpe and said "Ohmigod, that is soooo wrong."

But a bad byproduct of all of this family openness is that my status as Porn King is revived anew at my daughter's high school (though perhaps has never truly died out, as the Black Mass/Black Ass controversy recently showed). I got a sudden influx of friends requests from my daughter's teenaged guy friends, which surprised me until I looked a little closer at my own Friends list and saw a few b-movie people with handles like French Kitty and SuperHeidi and AssMonkey that probably sparked the imaginations of a few tender teenaged minds. Again I had to say no; it's just a good rule of thumb that adult men should not be friends with teenaged boys over the Internet. Even if they know people who call themselves Assmonkey.

Give me a shout at johnoakdalton@hotmail.com.

2 comments:

Pete Bauer said...

Being a parent, I am amused when I find myself saying phrases or in circumstances I never could have imagined when the baby was in the womb.

I'm sure your post has caused a similar reflection :)

PETE

chats said...

Did you see the special on Dateline about MySpace. com. It said their investigation found that this particular website was a breeding ground for child predators.

We blocked it from our computers at home. Unfortunately, they still use it at the local library. The good thing is that I receive a copy of all of their emails so I can look for anything suspicious.

One of my favorite shows is 24, also.

I enjoyed reading your blog.