March 6: Madman, Hacking, and Mental Illness

If you want to know the truth, I don't even know why i started all that stuff with her.  I mean about going away somewhere, to Massachusetts and Vermont and all.  I probably wouldn't've taken her even if she'd wanted to go with me.  She wouldn't have been anybody to go with.  The terrible part, though, is that I meant it when I asked her.  That's the terrible part.  I swear to God I'm a madman.

There is no doubt that Holden creeps toward a nervous breakdown during The Catcher in the Rye.  Several times, he makes the statement that he's a "madman" or crazy.  Allie's death and his parents' inability to help him deal with his grief have pushed Holden out of the rye to the edge of the cliff.  In the above passage, he's talking about his girlfriend, Sally; he's just asked her to run away with him, even though he doesn't really like her.  He's a bundle of contradicting emotions.  Happiness.  Sadness.  Obsession. Apathy.  He's all over the place.

I've sort of felt like Holden all day today.  It started this morning when I discovered that my Yahoo! mail account was hacked last night.  Some person has put some kind of virus/spyware on my laptop to track my keystrokes.  If that wasn't bad enough, said hacker sent messages to everybody in my address book, not even realizing that the majority of my contacts are outdated or disconnected.  When I logged in this morning, I was greeted by about 50,000 mailer demons or daemons or whatever they're called.  Now, I can't send messages from my Yahoo! account.  It's locked out.

I spoke to "Rajeev" from Yahoo! tech support who remotely ran a few diagnostic tests on my laptop and then tried to talk me into purchasing $200 worth of repairs from a certified Microsoft technician.  I told Rajeev I didn't even own the computer, and I wasn't going to shell out any money to get it fixed.  He seemed a little put-out by my response.  "Sir," he said, "you told me you're a professor at a university," as if that meant that I crapped twenty dollar bills.

Well, my madman day continued with a trip to the Help Desk at the university where a nice computer guy sat with my laptop for an hour to de-hacker it.  I, of course, kept asking what he probably considered stupid questions like "Should I change my password again after you're done cleaning it up?" and "Does it matter whether I use Mozilla or Internet Explorer?" or "Do you guys get much business over Spring Break?"  He probably wanted to re-image my mouth by the time we were done.

Everything is supposed to be clean now.  I'm going to have to watch my savings and checking accounts for the next few days.  And, when Yahoo! unlocks my mail, I have to send messages to my contacts to let them know I've been hacked, which sounds almost pornographic.

I don't feel quite so crazy anymore.  I feel safe.  Protected.  Hungry.  (My hunger has nothing to do with being hacked and everything to do with skipping lunch.)  Now, if photos of people having sex with donkeys start popping up on this blog, it's not from me.  Really.  I swear.

Saint Marty is a little classier than that.