My love/hate relationship w/the Net

I first got online back in 1995 when the internet was still young...Most people didn't have it, and some didn't even know what it was...In it's infancy the net was a place for brainiacs...There were no easy ways to post pictures or make websites...Words were about the only way people had to distingish themselves...

I absolutely loved it...I had got on the interent to "chat" with my boyfriend at the time...Our phone numbers were a toll call, and he convinced me to get the internet so that we could save some money...

This chatting stuff was great...I didn't use it so much to chat with him, but with other people...This really helped me at a time in my life when I wasn't very comfortable with myself... I was still feeling quite uncomfortable in my metamorphis into the perverbial swan...
 
The internet broke the rules...No one knew what anyone looked like...It was all your personality and brains that mattered...I felt comfortable for the first time in 4 years...

There was the occasional person that had shelled out the big bucks for a scanner that had a picture...The pics were usually totally from a magazine or sumfin and everyone took it with a grain of salt...

I went to a local chat room provided by my internet provider...Most everyone in there lived in my area...It was so much fun...I never cared to meet any of the people in there...I just liked talking to them...Most of them didn't feel the same way...They started having chat parties and meeting...That's when things got really screwed up...

My boyfriend and I were on the rocks when this happened...He wanted to go to these things, and I didn't...Chat had changed, and not for the better...People were hooking up left and right, and most didn't seem as interested in talking about current affairs as much as who was having an affair with who...

Satan, as I like to call this infamous ex of mine, was starting to hear a lot of "your girlfriend must look like a real beast since she won't show her face at a chat party" type comments...This, of course, hurt his pride...In an effort to save face, the bastard got a picture of me put on disk at Walgreens and proceeded to email it to everyone...

It was no ordinary picture...No, it wasn't an X rated one thank God, but it was one where I had tried very hard to look good...It was taken outside of a local club, so everyone knew it was real...I had a dress on cut up to here and down to there...Think J Lo...lol...Anyway, it had been taken on his birthday, and I had made an extra effort to look good for him that night...Usually I hate pics of myself, but even I thought "Damn" when I saw that one...Blonde bombshell was written all over it...

That was the beginning of the end for both Satan and I, and myself and the Internet...People that I sparred with at great length in chat were suddenly very nice...Women I had become buddies with suddenly weren't so friendly...The superficial things in life had reared there ugly heads in my safe little internet world...

I did go to chat parties eventually...After I dumped Satan, a real life friend of mine begged me to go to one, and I did...I'm sure I did it partly for her, but I am more sure that I did it to spite him...

It was unbelievable...The amount of people that had outright lied about what they looked like...There were women that had described themselves as a Cindy Crawford type that looked like Kathy Bates...Even my friend had to change her nick name and be someone new for a couple of weeks before the party because her original name was "CJ" as in Baywatch Pamela Anderson CJ, and she did not look like that...She was to embarrassed to admit her lies, so she started being herself...How others could have walked in there after telling such tall tales about themselves is beyond me...

Don't get me wrong...I did end up making some very good friends from those chat parties...I am glad that I ended up attending them....The Internet lost it's appeal to me after that, or at least the chatting part...All the uglies of life had reared their heads, and chatting just wasn't for me...By that time people were making sites and uploading pictures, and chat rooms turned into meat markets and places to hook up...When the big chats started getting popular, like yahoo or aol, that was the total end...The Internet had turned into life, or something even worse...

I still love the net...I use it to get information, and I make good extra spending money doing websites...I just don't love it for the same reasons anymore...I used to love it because you could be seen as who you really were, instead of outside appearances...In reality, many people were not acting how they really were, but who they wanted to be...I don't know which was a bigger disappointment...