Catfishing

Hey guys!

Today i'm writing the sort of heart to heart kind of post that i haven't been writing in what feels like forever (it has been a long while for reals), i hope y'all up to it :D.

Now, if you know me or even just been following my blog for a while then you'd probably known for a while that i get obsessed very easily. I'm the type of person that if i start getting interested in a topic, i will spend days, even weeks pondering over the subject, googling it, reading articles about it, watching videos about it - and it's usually a strange, even morbid kind of things because i am weird like that.

I can't even count the things that caught my interests for a long time because the list would be as long as my arms - but a few that i can remember is memento mori (death photography), dead bodies left to rot in Everest (which then grows to other mountains), assisted suicide to name a few - do you see a pattern here? LOL. No, i am not obsessed with death WTF, i just find it fascinating and i do have a strong case of morbid curiosity.

But the topic that i'm currently obsessing over is not so gloomy - although still quite sinister, one would say. It's "catfishing".

Have you ever heard of the word catfishing? And it's got nothing to do with fishes.

According to the dictionary :

cat·fish

ˈkatˌfiSH/

verb

gerund or present participle: catfishing

1.  fish for catfish.

1. 
   

   "with the Mississippi River far below its normal level, the catfishing kept getting better and better"

2. 

USinformal

lure (someone) into a relationship by means of a fictional online persona.

"he was being catfished by a cruel prankster

And i'm definitely talking about the second type hahaha.

I first heard about this term when i saw suggested videos on Youtube when i start watching storytime videos, i wasn't initially too interested to know what that even means-but i guess i was bored one day and clicked on one. After learning what catfishing really means and how quite a lot of people fell victim to catfishing (something that i can't imagine happening to me, being a skeptical person that i am), i became totally intrigued.

So intrigued i continue watching videos after videos telling stories about their catfishing stories, from a very mild one like girls in middle school inventing stories and making fake profiles pretending to be their boyfriends (i personally think this is very mild, i dunno if i'm one of the abnormals-but aren't most little girls have imaginary boyfriends? I never had an imaginary friend but i did have imaginary boyfriends *LOL*, these girls just take it to the next level by creating a fake account!) to full blown crazy stories of having a 3 year online relationship with a person who turned out to be catfish. How crazy is that?

I know not everybody agrees with me, but i can never understand an online relationship. I mean, i witness some real online relationship bloom into a solid, real thing-my friends married people they know online and they are very happy to this day, but i mean they eventually MEET in real life after a while and don't go on being boyfie and girlfie for years without ever meeting each other, i think that's just ridic! 

And please tell me you sense the super thick sarcasm -___-

After going through some videos (and realizing that there is even a TV show in MTV called "Catfish the TV Show" - which i am currently marathon watching), something dawned at me... I was a catfish once >.< *LOL*.

This was years and years ago, before the age of the internet comes along and we still wrote actual letters to each other - before the word "catfishing" was even invented i think - back to my junior high school days in late the late 90s.

I never planned to be a catfish, i am not a prankster and i consider myself to be a pretty quiet person in junior high (i admit that i cannot call myself quiet anymore now, but trust me-i was a very shy, very timid teenager) so i just never even imagine playing with someone else's emotion by pretending to be someone else-but there's this girl... that we (meaning me and my BFFs. Come to think about it, we did have a bit of a mean girls vibe that i guess i don't really realize until much later) don't really like. 

Now, this is NOT an excuse to play with anyone's heart-but this definitely was a reason. We nicknamed her Baby G (i really can't remember why we called her that. Probably because she kept on showing off her Baby G and thinks she's the coolest because she owns an expensive watch, you know junior high  schoolers and shit like that), if you ask anyone in my clique today, i KNOW that it would not take a sec for them to know who you're talking about :)).

This girl was (i met her a few times in recent years and in all honestly, i still don't like her *LOL*)  super annoying, she's obnoxious, she's arrogant and simply not a nice person to be around (and she leeched on us T.T, simply couldn't shake her off no matter how hard we tried). She also keeps on telling us about different guys chasing her (which is totally harmless actually, i was a dumb teenager who invent stories too, i dunno why her stories triggered this *LOL*) and one day... My friend and i (can't remember who the other person is anymore but i do remember i had a partner in crime) decided to create a fake admirer for her and see if she'd take the bait and boasts about it.

We made our male friend wrote a fake love letter to her (oh God, i was a pretty bad kid, wasn't i >.<, i truly didn't remember being so bad until now), telling her that his name was Y and he's a secret admirer of her. Then we passed the letter to her - it didn't take her very long to write a reply ofc :)).

So we wrote letters back and forth, and we also fished for stories from her-this way we can check if she's telling the truth or she makes the stories bigger. Obviously, it's the latter. She told us she went out with Y and they are boyfie girlfie (which is obviously not true since Y is not real) etc etc. One day i told her it's Y's birthday next week-and she actually asked me to accompany her to the mall and bought a very expensive item (for our standard lah. Well, no-actually it's still quite expensive for today's standard for a junior high schooler) for his present.

I think i might still have that item somewhere in my old room today WTF.

I honestly don't have anything to say about this except that i feel horrible about it now. I'm 33 and i am embarrassed of what the 12-13 year old me did. It's horrible, but at least i spared her the embarrassment because she never found out that Y never existed? LOL, i don't even know if that's a good or a bad thing.

And while i am editing this post, a realization just struck me that i was a catfish not only once WTF. I did it again to another girl early in our uni days, she was a fan of my then boyfriend (now husband :D) and she crossed the line when she kept on misscalling him AFTER she learnt that he had a girlfriend. Honestly, this one i don't feel very guilty about, i didn't do much unless fished out embarrassing confessions from her *LOLOLOLOL*. 

Oh.

I shouldn't be laughing, sorry.

Anyway...

Moral of the story? ANYONE can be a catfish, given the opportunity and the motif (even if it's just boredom). And gullible people are so easy to catfish WTF. PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE be careful online, it's SOOO much easier today to catfish online. SO EASY. 

Like i said, i never understand anyone who believes everything that some stranger told them online, YOU JUST NEVER KNOW. You know how easy it is for a real boyfriend/girlfriend to lie to you and cheat on you IN REAL LIFE, it's 100x easier to do it online. Don't give your heart out on someone you never even met, if he/she seems too good to be true, it most probably is. If you meet someone online and they seem to be wonderful, make sure to MEET them (or at least video call them WTF, it's so easy to check nowadays) as soon as you can before you start falling in love with them.

LISTEN TO NEV! I'M BEGGING YOU!

Seriously, all those girls i watched videos of... -___- they actually believe some model guys who look drop dead gorgeous actually randomly message you online... Seriously -____-. Not to say that it doesn't happen and you need to always be mean to any guy who contact you online, it's just like... 1 in 10.000 kind of thing, so why not be more careful than sorry?

In the end, i just want to share my own catfish story... A bit different because i'm the catfish (dafug) but i hope it gives a bit of a light on why anyone would do that. Not that i really know why i did it *LOL*, but i knew what prompted it.

And Baby G, if you're reading... I'm sorry >.<. I truly am.

#Pink