Simon Cowell and Terri Seymour: What is it with American Idol and text-message breakups?

(And with calling me “The [sic] BreakUp [sic] Girl“?)

Palin haiku? Done.

BG haiku? Once a year.

Breakup haiku: Now!

Here’s a recap of last week’s advice update, in case you were busy getting out the vote, keeping hope alive, etc.:

Ask Lynn, Breakup Girl’s alter ego’s advice columns at MSN.com (powered by Match.com), is now being updated monthly rather than weekly (boo!) … but now you’ll get two new ones at a time (yay!). So, for November, we’ve got not one but two different fellas pining for two different gals who, long before election day, appear to have appointed themselves co-mayors of Mixed Messages City.

There’s

1. Waiting Gamer, wondering if his flip-flopper-in-chief will leave her lame boyfriend and be his cuddling mate for real

and

2. Rave Boy, wondering how to win back the vote of his ex, who is clearly undecided.

Read the letters and Lynn’s advice, and then come back here to comment — early and often!

Ask Lynn, Breakup Girl’s alter ego’s advice columns at MSN.com (powered by Match.com), is now being updated monthly rather than weekly (boo!) … but now you’ll get two new ones at a time (yay!). So, for November, we’ve got not one but two different fellas pining for two different gals who, long before election day, appear to have appointed themselves co-mayors of Mixed Messages City.

There’s

1. Waiting Gamer, wondering if his flip-flopper-in-chief will leave her lame boyfriend and be his cuddling mate for real

and

2. Rave Boy, wondering how to win back the vote of his ex, who is clearly undecided.

Read the letters and Lynn’s advice, and then come back here to comment — early and often!

You may have heard that virtual gaming worlds can engender real-life economies. As it turns out, virtual breakups — and, more to the point, virtual revenge — may also have real-world consequences. As PC World/The Washington Post reports:

The line between virtual reality and its flesh-and-blood cousin blurred a little this week as a 43-year-old Tokyo woman was jailed for murdering her virtual ex-husband’s* avatar.

After she suddenly found herself divorced in “MapleStory,” a popular 2-D side scrolling MMORPG, the unidentified woman used her ex-husband’s ID and password [which, the AP notes, she had gotten from him when all was well in both worlds] to log into the game and kill him off. Call it Death by Deletion.

When the man discovered his beloved avatar was gone, he contacted authorities, which led to the woman’s arrest. “I was suddenly divorced, without a word of warning,” the woman told investigators. “That made me so angry.” The AP reports that the woman had no intention to carry out violence in reality.

The charges are “illegally accessing a computer and manipulating electronic data,” which carries a sentence of up to five years in jail or a fine up to $5,000.

I’m not saying anyone’s justified in killing anyone, except perhaps a Pirate Octopus. But yeah, before you dump someone — anywhere — it wouldn’t hurt to at least have a talk. No man, after all, is a Maple Island.

*From Wikipedia: “Players may participate in in-game marriages at the town of Amoria. Guests may be invited to the wedding, and the marrying couple will receive wedding ring items. The wedding ‘ceremony’ requires the completion of various quests. If a premium wedding ticket from the Cash Shop was purchased, the player is entitled to have a party after the ceremony. In Amoria Dungeon, players can fight exclusive monsters. The KoreaMS version of Amoria has been altered to remove the training grounds and the Chapel area, leaving only the Cathedral. MapleStory currently does not allow same-sex marriage.”

Moving on from January 12, 1998…

Dear Breakup Girl,

I just broke up with my beau of eight years; now I am FIERCELY attracted to a co-worker. I have never asked a guy out. Should I start now, and ask this one out?

–Hopeless

Dear Hopeless,

Of course you’re fiercely attracted to a co-worker. Let me guess: is it Bob from Accounting … or Joe from Rebound? Right after the end of such a long relationship, everyone’s going to look good — especially the beaux-to-be who are the worst ideas. Breakup Girl is not saying you should never ask this guy out. I am just saying that you need to be particularly circumspect about stirring up a solution that contains not one but two combustible ingredients. My advice: let Octavio from the Piercing Parlor be your rebound. Then see how good Joe looks to you in the company cafeteria.

Love,
Breakup Girl

Daily Mail, via Boing Boing:

“A married couple who decided to go their separate ways agreed to divide their home and its contents literally — by sawing the house in half.

One day the house was standing on stilts in a Cambodian village. The next, only half was there.

The wife will keep the half that is standing, while the husband has carried off bits and pieces of the home to put them up in a nearby field.”

Getting your stuff back on January 12, 1998…

Dear Breakup Girl,

I dated my ex for about a year. We broke up last year, but I have yet to get all my things out of his apartment. He told me he has still kept my toothbrush. I don’t want him back, I just would like my stuff back! How would there be a good way to go about this?

— Jaime

Dear Jaime,

Surely you’ve replaced the toothbrush by now. But Breakup Girl still wonders what on earth he’s doing with your toothbrush. Has he bronzed it? Or, conversely, does he just keep it around for use as the “guest toothbrush?” Neither one is good news.

In any case, here’s what you need to do…

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A woman in Ireland who got caught shoplifting blamed the theft on a bad breakup — which, she claimed, had suddenly left her in dire financial straits and in debt to other people. (Judging by what she clipped, she owed someone a pair of $170 flip-flops.)

I’ve had some bad breakups, which have left me crying on my kitchen tiles or quicksanding into my couch for a My So-Called Life-athon while working my way through a metric ton of Chubby Hubby. So I’m impressed. I mean hey, this lass managed to at least leave the house.

And really — though she did have a string of prior convictions — maybe her actions are not, at least at their core, so out-there after all. This article notes, and it’s by no means the first, that “when unmarried couples who have been living together part company, women are substantially worse off economically than men, according to a study in the Journal of Marriage and Family.”

But if she’d lived in China, apparently, it’s possible that she could at least have asked her flip-flopping boyfriend for “a ‘parting fee,’ or fenshou fei, upon the termination of a long-term relationship, or ’emotional compensation,’ ganqing peichang,'” according to this recent report on Forbes.com. “These ‘parting fees’ are not a legal matter, given the casual nature of dating. Call it an informal economic system for affairs of the heart — with all the attendant moral questions that arise when love and money mix.” Indeed! Interesting piece; check it out. And if you’re gonna steal anything, make it someone’s heart. (Awww!)

Here, from FOBG Mary Beth Williams at Salon.com, a dismaying/touching account of the penny-pinch of heartbreak:

Sep. 22, 2008 | My marital separation would be so much easier if I were in a better income bracket. Then again, if I were in a better income bracket, maybe my husband and I wouldn’t be separating at all. I could rattle off all the reasons why the man that I promised to love forever is not sleeping next to me tonight. I can list all the heartaches we’ve endured over the last two years. Or I could cut to the chase and tell you that this is a story about money.

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