So here I am, newly a member of yet another upstart digital community because it helps me keep in touch with a long distance friend. If you thought the cellular service wars were bad….

Join OUR group and you can talk to your friends for free! Don’t worry about the restrictions, we’ll explain it all after you’ve committed for 2 years.

Has become….

Join OUR group because it’s free and you’ve been especially invited by your very good friend, Beezlebub! And now a word from our sponsors.

At last count, I am currently retaining almost two dozen online identities and email addresses. Online access to various financial areas are NOT included in this total, nor are the various and sundry identities that I have abandoned or just plain forgotten about over the years. These are just the ones I use on a regular (or semi-regular) basis. If I’m not careful, I may soon forget who I am.

Why so many? Well, personal safety and the illusion of privacy, for one. There are some really nutty people out there on the internet and I am disinclined to simply hand them to keys to my palace, as it were – not that I feel important enough to be sought out for stalking per se, just that it’s common sense to take certain precautions to protect your interests on the internet just as you would in real life. Speaking of which, as Ang so recently pointed out to me, no one has friends anymore anyway. You either have Online Friends or you have Real-Life Friends. While I have met some incredible people through the internet and struck up friendships with a few, there are things I just don’t feel comfortable revealing to people I’ve never met face to face. Nor, to be honest, to many of those whom I have.

Spam minimization is another. There’s no avoiding it. There just isn’t. The best you can do is to maintain a throw-away mailbox or two where you can direct contacts you don’t trust not to turn around and sign you up for ways to increase the flow of traffic to your website. And porn.

Then there are the places which seem benign enough aside from the fact that they hold your friends electronically hostage until you sign up with them. And so, since, like cellular service, your friends never seem to all pick the same one, you end up at yet another registration screen trying to pick a login name that bears even a little resemblance to your growing list of identities because 54 other people out there already used up all the decent variations of L337Grrl.

And let me tell you. It can take a lot of effort to come up with a good digital identity. You want it to be identifiable, but not too revealing. If at all possible, it should not contain any numbers unless they actually have contextual meaning (see L337Grrl). It should be reflective of the real you because, with all the other identities you’re maintaining, it would just be too exhausting to lie. Of course, you falsify as much of the ‘required’ information as you can during registry to protect yourself from the weirdos and spambots, but that’s beside the point.

However, this does allow me to point out the one reason to create an alternate identity that isn’t steeped in cynicism: the opportunity to explore special interests and personality quirks that you wouldn’t necessarily tell your mother about, all in relative obscurity from the privacy of your own home. Want to join a news group for cat herders without being mocked by your friends? Become the elusive and mysterious CatWrangler! Looking for a support group for a rather embarassing diagnosis? (It’s for your friend, of course.) Wear the mask of BusterGut or the invincible ColonGirl!

Just make sure you write it down somewhere so you don’t forget who you are. Or where.

Let me just say that the employees of the Department of Motor Vehicles for the state of Wisconsin in Madison are the nicest government employees I have met anywhere. Ever. Not nice-for-government-employees nice; just nice. And helpful. I know! It’s like an alternate reality in here.

That said, the requirements for obtaining a driver’s license in this state were somewhat prohibitive when we arrived. Although they allowed a much more relaxed 30 days to do so (compared to California’s speedy 10), it didn’t seem likely that many honest citizens could meet that deadline. For instance, in addition to the standard two forms of identification required, they wanted to see a utility bill sent to you at your new address. A utility bill that was over 30 days old. If you had a relative who was a current resident on hand to vouch for you, you could get around that particular requirement. Of course, the DMV here isn’t open on weekends and my closest relative has a day job and lives 90 miles away. So, not really an option.

Adding on the fact that my CA license was due to expire before the 30 day mark, you can see that I was in a bit of a bind here. So, I did what I had to. Two days after my license expired (my first potential opportunity), I got there an hour before they opened to make sure I was the first in line, politely presented the paperwork I did have, tried to look very organized and prepared and hoped for the best. Apparently, luck was with me because the utility envelope received only a passing glance and I was not forced to explain and plead leniency. As an added bonus, they took one look at me and “corrected” the hair color on my new license from the auburn listed on the request form (the real color) to red (recently dyed). I decided not to press my luck to get it fixed.

Fast forward to two weeks later when I meet Mym at the DMV to help him get his license. Since all the bills are in my name, we had been told when we came in a month prior that I could simply vouch for him once I had obtained residency. One week later, unbeknownst to us, the policy changed.

Vouching is no longer a valid form of identification. Apparently, it was providing a loophole through which unsavory people residing in nearby states could come in and establish a false residency. It was too easy. Student ID’s are accepted as an alternative, but he won’t have that until he registers next week and we were counting on the residency status to keep his school fees down. So, he can’t get his driver’s license without a student ID and he can’t get his in-state student ID without the driver’s license. Perhaps in compensation for the added inconvenience of the policy change(read: to prolong the agony), the DMV extended their 30 day deadline to 60 days.

On the off chance that we can get an extension on the school part, we’re adding Mym’s name to the bills to prove to the DMV that he really does live here. Because they don’t accept signed copies of the rental agreement. Or blood.

I have GOT to get me one of these!

(For you non-geeks out there, it’s html and anime humor.)