Just Addicted

I remember when we got the internet.
I was in 6th grade.
It was dial up, and it was AOL 2.0 or something.
I just remember AOL 3.0 coming out soon thereafter and my friend and I thought it was THE SHIT.

I remember my first screenname/email address.
RaeMars5.
It was a Sailor Moon reference.
Yes, I was a dork.

I LOVED the internet (shit, I still do.)
I would spend HOURS on it, holding up the phone line, and running up a HUGE bill.
I don't even know what the fuck I was doing. In 1996 there was only about 6 fucking websites and 5 of them were probably porn.



(no that picture isn't me, do you think I'm 45?)

I would waste hours in chatrooms.
I would lie about my age. I would lie about my name.
I was 17/F and my name was Lydia.
None of that was true in 1996. And it's not true now either.
A friend and I would create angelfire pages for EVERYTHING.
We made them for boybands.
We made them for ourselves.
We made them for our cats.
I remember before mp3s even existed and I would download MIDIs.
I had a folder FULL of MIDIs.
To this day I wish I still had them. They would definitely be good for some lulz.
I remember waiting 17 minutes for a 30 second clip to load and the quality of the video was FUCKING AWFUL but it was still better than TV.
I participated in a role playing chatroom piece of lameness where not only did I pretend I was a vampire, but I pretended I was a MALE vampire.

But what takes the cake is the one day I somehow spend 17 hours straight on the internet.
No youtube, no hulu, no illegal mp3s, and no porn (IT WAS A FAMILY COMPUTER.)
But there I sat, in the kitchen, only getting up for meals and the bathroom, doing god knows what on A-O-FUCKING-L.

It is simultaneously my proudest and the lowest moment of my life.
Now if only I could find a few of these laying around.
They make excellent coasters.