A great deal of my communication used to revolve around Instant Messenger. I had IM friends, but for the most part I used it to communicate with offline friends. I'm not much of a phone person, and my friends were spread out in Texas and beyond, so it was perfect.

Considering how much further away I am now, it would stand to reason that I would be using it more often than before. It hasn't exactly worked out that way. One of my decisions before leaving Texas was to cut down on some of the friends that were relying a little too much on me for moral support. I'm happy to help someone when they're down, but after the second or third year of being leaned on it gets old.

But the biggest reason is that I don't really have the time. I can't use it at work, don't have it set up at Eel's (and am unlikely to go over there to spend time online), and my computer situation at the apartment is spotty at best. It turns out that the last time I installed Windows on my laptop and primary desktop computers, I didn't tell Trillian (an all-in-one IM application) to log in on boot-up.

The other day, for some reason, it started logging in to Trillian. Suddenly I was bombarded with messages. Luckily most of them were from the people I did want to hear from and I got to update some of them on how things are going. But while I was talking to people I wanted to talk to, I lived in fear of being dragged into a conversation I didn't want to get in to.

It kinda reminded me why I stopped logging on.

Which is a shame because I really did like talking to people I hadn't in a while. I suspect I'm going to have to bite the bullet and make a new AIM account.