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Vice Blog

NEW YORK - THE INTERNET ALMOST SOLD ME INTO AUSTRALIAN SEX SLAVERY

We'll be stuffing our Technology Issue down your throats when it comes out next week. To warm up your digestive track, here's a little story about how computers can fuck up your romantic life…

I met my most recent IRL ex-gf by waxing poetic with some Tori Amos lyrics on Craigslist all lesbian-style, and that went pretty well for a year--but now she tells people that I'm schizophrenic. I stepped away from using the computer as a dating tool for a while after that, until one day I started getting romance messages on MySpace from an Australian girl. This girl contacted me out of the blue one day and gave some sort of compliment about my glasses. She had glasses too, so I guess it was like "a thing." I am uncertain as to how the exchanging of messages with this girl progressed from casual novelty to that of pure insanity, but within a month of chatting with her I was asking my dad to mail me my birth certificate so that I could get a passport.

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At one point we actually started saying the we loved each other, and were going through life as though we were in a relationship. A relationship wherein both parties still slept with other people while exchanging holy vows to each other over Gmail chat, but never actually meeting in real life. To this day, when I tell people this story, they look at me like I am waving a knife around in the air at them, but at the time I thought that everyone was just so feeble and pedestrian for not understanding the rare beauty of going against all odds for a difficult and beautiful chance at star-crossed love. When my friends would ask me questions about my Australian "relationship" I would go on and on about it, and try my hardest to shrug off their "you are so insane right now" facial expressions.

At the height of its seriousness, I talked to my dad on the phone again and told him that I was actually considering moving to Australia. His reaction was frantic and I was basically like, "I AM SO PUT UPON!" He got all

CSI

on me, trying to crack the case, and begged me to mention something about my family being in the law enforcement business. He was convinced that the person I had been chatting with was not actually who I thought she was at all, but in fact an elderly overweight Australian criminal who was making efforts to lure me over there to be sold into sexual slavery. He urged me to make mention of all of this to my fake girlfriend, and bet me good money that I would never hear from her again.

The next time I talked on the phone to my Australian lover, I made a huge joke about what my dad had said. Within weeks we stopped talking. Even though I talked to this person on the phone, received pictures of her rubbing her boobies on her dog, and made a writing colleague out of her brother, I am now convinced that her name is actually Levone, and that had I crossed over to her ass-backwards country, I would now be cowering naked in a grass hut somewhere, being paid hourly to fuck kangaroos.

KELLY McCLURE