I'm not a stalker, I'm an INTERNET DETECTIVE.

Confession: Although I held out longer than most on joining Facebook, I am exactly the type of person for whom social networking is designed.

Which is to say: Hi, my name is Kat, and I'm a cyberstalker.

I'm embarrassed to admit that I have been doing this for a loooong time. In fact, I think I'm a sort of first-waver; having come of age just as the internet went mainstream, I belonged to that inaugural group of creepy people who kept tabs on all their friends, and especially on ex boyfriends, by obsessively checking their AIM away messages and buddy info to see what they were up to. (See? It's not just about being a complete sketch case – it's about keeping the legacy alive!)

I know some of you guys, if not guilty of this yourselves (oh, admit it, will you?) will at least remember the dawn of the AIM away message/info screen as a sort of low-tech precursor to not just the Facebook status message, but to the entire profile. You'd get the status updates, the random quotes/song lyrics, the inside-jokey messages that were meant to be understood by just one person and were basically like a passive-aggressive way of publicly announcing, "I have a very special friend!" (I once spent an entire semester in a message-tradeoff with a friend at Johns Hopkins University. It was a lot of fun, though possibly ill-advised given that he eventually got bored of the cyber-stalking and began stalking-stalking me instead.) And similarly, you could sometimes discern that there was a feud going on when one friend's away message read, "Some people should learn to mind their business", and another's read, simply, "FUCK YOU".

And then, like all things, away-messages were eventually discarded in favor of newer, more multi-functional tools like Facebook or Twitter or (God, I am so old) Friendster – all of which amounted to fabulous new weapons in my cyberstalker's arsenal.

Not so fabulous, however: the people I most wanted to stalk online (hello, ex boyfriends) were sadly inaccessible to me, mostly because I tend to date men who are luddites by Web 2.0 standards. Which is not such a terrible thing -- especially when you consider that the one internet-savvy guy I dated turned out to be just a bit TOO internet-savvy ("What were you doing on casual encounters? What's that file folder? Wait, are those… penis pictures?!") – but it does make it awfully hard to get the kind of stalky satisfaction I've come to expect from social networking sites when none of my intended stalkees have Facebook profiles.

And the guy I most wanted an update on, the one I dated during senior year of college and for my first year in New York? Well, he was so totally absent from the internet that not even googling could help me.

This, of course, is where a normal person would just give up and, oh, I don't know, get a life, perhaps. Preferably one which does not include so much as one minute spent idly wondering what ever happened to That Guy, and whether he is married now, and if so, whether his wife looks like a walrus.

Except that -- and I know this will surprise the shit out of everyone -- I am not a normal person.

Which is how I convinced myself that, rather than just giving up the ghost on finding out what my elusive former boyfriend was up to, I should (I am cringing right now) email him. Out of nowhere. After approximately four years without so much as a whisper of contact.

In hindsight, the most embarrassing part is not just that I decided to do this. It is that I was not even drunk at the time.

And so it was that I dashed off a short message, one in which I attempted (and failed, oh my God, failed) to non-awkwardly segue from "Been a long time!" to "What are you doing now?" to "Oh, by the way, I'm married! And you probably knew that already! But I am telling you anyway so that you will not mistake this email for a booty call!"

I finished with the far-too-chipper, "Well, anyway, happy holidays!"... and then, fool that I am, I sent it.

And then...
... nothing happened.

Though I was miffed at first, I began to feel more and more relieved as the days passed without any response. So the Elusive Ex didn't want to catch up with me? Well, who cares! Not me! And when, after two weeks, there was still no reply, I even began to indulge in the idea that perhaps he had not even seen the email -- that it had been accidentally deleted, or caught in a spam filter, or best of all, had simply winked out of existence somewhere in the ether of the internet, as messages occasionally do.

And then, of course, he wrote back.

"Hey," the message read, "Sorry I didn't get back to you sooner, but I was/am sort of busy and it slipped my mind."

Oooh, burn, I thought. Well, fine -- let him play his little game. All I ever wanted was to stalk him from afar, anyway.

The next sentence was, "Congratulations on getting married (mind-blowing)," followed by an obliging recap of the Elusive Ex's current doings, his occupation (lawyer), hobbies (music) and living arrangement (dude from college). But I kept returning to the first paragraph -- the Busy thing, followed by the Mind-blowing thing -- and rereading it, feeling twitchier each time I did so.

What does he mean, 'mind-blowing'? I thought. Is it 'mind-blowing' in a "wow, we're getting older" sort of way? Or is it 'mind-blowing' in that he cannot believe I actually found someone dumb enough to tie himself to me for the rest of his life? And then, suddenly and irrevocably convinced that it was the latter, Who the fuck does he think he is?!

It is worth mentioning at this point that one of the primary reasons for my breakup with the elusive ex was that, between his laconicism and my general psychosis, I had always spent far too much time analyzing the shit out of everything he said.

Apparently, some things never change.

But if I ever mention, even in passing, that I am planning to email old so-and-so with whom I used to swap spit, please remind me that no good will come of it. And if I refuse to see reason, please tie me to something and beat me in the face with a three-pound wet salmon until I pass out.