Creepy

by emily. Sun 25 Jan 2009, 6:23 pm

Okay, fuck, the creepiest thing happened tonight.

I'm on this online language site because I'm trying to be all intelligent and learn a language - and yes, continuing Japanese at school would have been logical but I really hated that subject.

So anyway, I log in this morning for the first time in a month because I have no motivation, and I have no messages or anything. I sort of screw around on the messenger for like five minutes, but I really only know how to say "hello, my name is emily (saluton, mia nomo estas emily)" so I didn't really understand what everyone else was writing.

Then I get this little thing that says I have a new message. So I open it and even though my Esperanto is really, really bad, I can get the jist of the first line at least. And it's... really, really creepy.

kara amikino !

mi nomiĝas carlos araujo,loĝas brazil,aĝas 49 jaroj.
vi ne parolis en lernu kun neniu!

donos al mi via adresso por sendas bildkartojn a vin

mi brakumas vin kaj familion

Which translates to:

"Dear Friend,

My name is [I am named] Carlos Aruajo, I live in Brazil, age 49 years.

You don’t speak with anyone [no one] on Lernu.

Give me your address so I can send you a picture/postcard [of you? idk]

I embrace you and your family."

So, you know, I was pretty creeped out by that. And it's kinda funny, I guess, in an 'oh my fucking God I just got a message from a forty-nine year old man on the internet asking for my address' kinda way, but at the same time it's really, really fucking scary.

Especially on sites like that where you don't really expect people to be lurking. I mean, he could just be a nice old bloke for all I know (there's no way I'm taking the risk of replying for a guy who won't even pretend not to be a pedo) but he could be a potential predator who just thinks I'm stupid. And it is weird because I actually learned heaps from his message, like about sentence structure, and that's really the only reason I'm on the site. To learn a language. And honestly, I am fairly cautious about sites where I interact with other users a lot, and even though I have met up with people I met online I was fairly sure of who they were, had seen pictures, MySpace accounts, YouTube accounts, talked to them for a long time and were fairly sure they were safe. And even with all that, I still took some precautions like meeting them in the middle of Federation Square where it would be virtually impossible to be abducted without being seen and easy to cause a fuss.

I don't know, it was just a really creepy experience, especially since I'd never spoken to him before. Like I would get to know someone before I asked for their address, pedo or no.

I'm just glad I didn't bother putting a photo up.

Urgh, that was weird.

-

In other news, I've never made a journal on here before and I think I sound like mega-n00b.
lulz, what's new?