More Like Instant DEATHINGER!!!, Part I
Soma

I have a nervous habit. An addiction, really. They say the first step is admittance. I hope it's true.

I know people who bite their nails. Sometimes their nails get raw, but besides that, it's just a mindless dance of teeth and keratin. Other people tap their feet or make clicks with their tongue or wrench their hands together or bite their lip or god knows what else, but none of these can really do much more than make a little noise or a little pain, make the person next to you give you an evil eye or your mom to give you an ill word or two. None of these are nearly as damaging - not even close! - to what I am embattled with.

We're all familiar with AIM. I'm sure some of us are even kind of addicted to it. We'll sit there for thousands of hours a day type type typing until carpal tunnel renders our hands useless.

That is not my problem.

My problem stems from a small, innocent looking button that makes it home on the bottom right of the IM window, emblazoned with a giant 'I' - yes, you know what I'm talking about. The Info button.

While most people will casually check a profile now and again to see how their friends are faring in the game of life, I obsess over it. Without even thinking I click it once, twice, seventy times in the course of a single minute! There is no way to stop this single-clicking powerhouse - even when engrossed in deep deep conversation I keep clicking, clicking, clicking, always clicking! The moment that my fingers leave the keyboard they are drawn immediately to the mouse like an ever-starving feline! The reds on black and the size 8s and the courier news assault my visual cortex again and again, my eyes glaze over the ''shout outs'' and the ''lols'' and the cryptic and meaningful (but ultimately purely aesthetic) contents of my friends and neighbors hundreds of times a day without any rhyme or reason.

The high point of my day becomes when I see a change in a profile - I feel like Neil Armstrong, the first man to set foot on the foreboding and unknown territory that is a virgin profile. I am Moses, high atop the mountain, ready to recieve whatever it is that God might wish to bestow upon me. Usually it's some bland, minimalist saying that has a 75% chance of coming out of a song, but every once in awhile I hit something that keeps me on my profile high - and it's those choice nuggets that keep me addicted.

The problem isn't that I check it. Oh no no. If that was the problem, I'd be in league with the nailbiters and handwrenchers. The issue here is that profile-checking is a disease. A cancer. It starts so innocently enough online, purely focused on other people, purely a time waster - but slowly, every so slowly, it eats away at the rest of your life, tunnelling into your own online life and further and further and WHAM! then you've smashed your face up against the cruel elevator doors of AIMdom in real life, and you've got no buttons to press but down.