YOU'RE HISTORY!

I did it. I took the plunge. Today, I dumped MSN Messenger. "It's not you. It's me," I said as I pressed "uninstall." I'm just too old--and too bored--to keep having the same old conversation over and over, night after night: "Hola." "Hola." "Como estás?" "Bien. Y vos?" "Todo bien. Que hacías?" Argh!!!

And you know what? I haven't felt so liberated and so alive since, well, since I got rid of my last boyfriend, with whom I probably spent more time on MSN than in person. (Argentines are particularly addicted to MSN Messenger. For them, it's right up there with tango, cholesterol, mate and casual sex.) This afternooon as I walked through the avenidas of Palermo, running errands and bopping along to the jams being kicked out by my iPod, something dawned on me. This, I thought, is living. Being face-to-face with real people. Bumping into them. Shoving them aside. Giving them dirty looks. You know, being part of an actual community.

As Dead Or Alive's Pete Burns once sang: "What I really need to do is find myself a brand new lover." So...

So long, Messenger! No more hours of inane small talk, communicating with people I've met only once or twice and strangers whom I'll probably never meet--and probably shouldn't want to. After all, don't I get enough of that on Facebook, with the winks, the pokes, the crazy applications, the friendship requests from total strangers? (BTW, those are next on my must-avoid-like-the-plague list.) From now on, anyone who wants to talk to me will have to do it the old-fashioned way: by email, by SMS or--how's this for a novel approach?--with a phone call. 

Wait, forget I said that! I hate talking on the phone. Send me an SMS. Maybe we can arrange to do brunch. Or not.