underscoring

underscore. i hadn't heard of one until i had heard of email. which was in strasbourg. i was away for a week there in 1998. and there was an internet cafe in the complex where we were staying. it was one of the buildings related to the council of europe. i was there on a seminar. can popular culture help european integration? i think we concluded that it couldn't. but it was a great week. and i met lovely people from all over geographical europe. and we talked. we talked a lot. so there was an internet room there. and somehow from there i opened a hotmail account. i think or was it yahoo? anyway, it began there. and from that account that week i emailed my best friend back in london. and that is when i heard of underscores. because some people i exchanged email addresses with in strasbourg had them in their name. little horozontal lines seperating their name from their year of birth or something like that. underscore. it seems that computer programming and things like that do not like spaces. space. and the internet enters my space. fills it often. i guess this is a funny place to be writing about this. that is why i never wanted a blog. but i need a blog to comment on someone else's blog. so i decided to call it underscore. one of those unique abserdities of the internet. a world of infinite space yet unable to deal with spaces.