i signed up to last.fm, the music community website, almost three years ago. i don’t know anyone really in real life that uses it, but to put it simply, it’s kind of like the website pandora and facebook would produce if websites could get married, go on a honeymoon, and bam! nine months later, have this beautiful social networking/internet radio baby. to use last.fm, you have to set up whatever media players you use on your own computer. this way, whenever you’re just working on your laptop and listening to music at the same time, last.fm is quietly working away in the background, keeping track of everything you’re listening to. this is called scrobbling. scrobbling lets you do lots of really cool things. for one, last.fm keeps track every single artist you’ve listened to and the amount of times a particular song has been heard. it also puts together a radio station just for you and everything it knows you love to listen to. however, not only do you get a radio station with the music you hear, you also get a station made up solely of recommendations, artists and songs last.fm thinks you would enjoy listening to. scrobbling also helps out by finding people with similar tastes and calling you neighbors.

one day in july 2008, i was just surfing around last.fm. i don’t know to this very day how i got to this profile, but i found a guy whose user pic was a great shot of tom selleck leaning out of some monster of a car in his shining mustache-glory.

there was no way i could just walk on by this profile, so i figured there was no harm in me saying hello and giving props where props go. what followed from there was a very nice shoutbox (last.fm equivalent of facebook’s wall) correspondence. i learned that this boy is named thierry, he’s french, and speaks/writes fantastic english. from there, we moved onto last.fm mail, and after that wasn’t quite personal enough, we started emailing each other. thierry has so far always held that he’s through-and-through french, but i have my misgivings because he’ll send me these enormous emails in english (not his native tongue) where i cannot find a single mistake. whenever i try to compliment him, he always brushes me off, saying he’s terrible. now that we’ve been keeping in touch for more than a year, we have each other on google talk so, sometimes when he’s up really late or i’m up really late, our lives will intersect and we’ll have a nice real-time chat. he lives on the northwestern coast of france so that means there’s a time difference of about six hours.

neither of us is really that large, but the distance between us is </cheestastic>

as far as our emails go, it’s nothing really out of the ordinary or lifetime movie-romantic. we talk mostly about school and our jobs and our friends and how drab each of our countries are. we also talk about visiting each other and how he wants to study abroad here and how i want to study abroad over there. i really do consider him a real friend. just tonight i received another of his emails, and he mentioned that he’d been re-reading our old emails and how funny it was to see where we both were when we first met. i’ve had the happy fortune of having several pen pals in my lifetime, but i readily admit i am a terrible one. i am the first to slack off, and i feel so lame when i get messages from thierry. he takes the time and puts in the effort to write me these passages of what he’s been up to and i don’t. i know that i should be replying to him instead of writing in this thing, but thierry is such a nice guy, i thought i would mention him.

i’m going to go write him a reply right now!

Tags: emails, france, friends, guys, last.fm, people

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