chat?!... WTF?

yeah tonight I played and for some reason chat was back on. No abuse though, a couple of the players were quite fair and shared the usual nh and stuff. Trouble is, if I start liking an opponent, that also makes me play less than optimally against them. Kind of reverse tilt. My psychology changes to .... "ah, we'll let him have that one huh". The last player was the perfect example of this... He was tight and fairly passive preflop but played quite well post. So I adjusted (before the chat) to raise almost every button since he was letting me have the blinds so much. This is a standard adjustment to this type of player. However, he started joking about my rare limps and folds and it kind of made me tighten my button raising range. Just a little, but enough to blunt my edge somewhat. I'd love to make a network of friends on Absolute, but until I am confident enough in my game that I can chat and still play my best poker I think it's best I keep it turned off.
An update about poker... I'm going to head into the murky mire of play again. I've got through about 2/3 of the vids on HUSNG now and I think I'll try and balance playing the game with the remaining vids. Hopefully I can turn around my bad start to the tens within the next 200/300 games so I can move up to the twenties or thirties. I also want to target 300 games per month but this will only be possible once I start 2-tabling. I'm not quite ready for that adjustment IMO, so for now I'll try and do 150-200. GL all