January 5, 2008

• Internet Intimacy: My first E-lationship (patent pending)

  Ouch, that might be one of my worst puns yet. Anyway, I decided the best way to discuss Internet Intimacy would be for me to actually tell a real-life story for once. This happened a decade ago, so I feel ok with statutes of limitations and such, heh. Let me tell you about my first Internet relationship,
  period. My dad signed up for Internet services for years, but it wasn’t until
  1997, my senior year of high school, that I was interested in surfing the WWW. I tried the Internet because I was in an
  academic competition that was JeopardyonSteroids* (JOS). It consisted of teams
  all over the US.
  They had an on-line forum board, so I wanted to talk about JOS with other
  people. 

  When I got on-line, I had two plans: (1) Don’t visit any
  site except the JOS site and (2) Don’t talk to people I could never meet in
  person. Perhaps my 17 year-old self was wiser than my 27 year-old self when it
  came to the Internet? heh. Anyway, one day in January a little box popped up on
  AOL: “Bing!”. And there were words
  appearing in it! What was it? What was this “IM” thingy?!

  It was a 15-year-old girl who was also in JOS. I had sent
  her an annoying e-mail about something she wrote on the JOS web-site, where I
  basically had told her I was cooler than her. But one of the wonders of
  Internet communication is that any attention offered is usually enough to get a
  conversation going. So she IM’ed me, and her quick typing compared to my slow
  hunt-and-peck method made me feel dumb in comparison. The first real benefit I
  got from the Internet is I learned to type from AIM—take
  that, Mavis Beacon! If you were a 15-year-old girl, Mavis, I would have learned
  typing before I turned 17.

  

  Anyway, at the time I was a senior, co-captain of the soccer
  team (that's me on the right after yet another loss, ha, along with my best friend from high school), high academic honor type, in a small school where my graduating class was
  15 people. I‘m an oldest child, too. I was very defined by my roles in life,
  and had a fixed, limited vision of who I was. Suddenly, this Web relationship
  changed all that. I felt free to joke as I pleased and not worry that word
  would get around my small school or that I’d let down my family. I realized
  that I could be funny! or at least funny enough to make a 15-year-old girl type
  LOL. (Yes, you can make a snarky comment about how it doesn’t take much, heh).
  This was a revelation for me; I had had several platonic female friends in
  middle school and high school, but there had not been much humor in those
  relationships. Mutual respect and great conversation, yes, but not humor. Even
  now, I often forget that women really do love humor. I think it’s because they
  are so poor at creating humor, I forget that they enjoy laughter. (My turn for
  a snarky comment!)

   Also, I forgot to tell you, at the time I’m in a mostly
  white community…and here she is, living in Hollywood*, dark-skinned (Southeast Asian, to
  be precise), and yet we still get along. Don’t think I wasn’t intrigued at the
  time by knowing a real Hollywood girl. We bond
  around JOS and talk often in-between dial-up Internet crashes. And here we are,
  so different, yet it seems like we have so much in common. She enjoys JOS, so
  do I. She’s smart, so am I. So we talk about that all the time, start to know
  and be known. She sends me pictures of her. I met her at a JOS tournament
  briefly, so I know she’s not a 50-year-old man, ha. I make other on-line
  friends from JOS, but she is my favorite. So I’m trapped in a wonderful cycle
  during the second half of my senior year; I come home from basketball practice,
  attack my homework, study for JOS, and then get on late at night just as she
  signs on from the West Coast. I talk until I'm tired and then go to sleep.

  

  That year, my team for JOS was weak (pictured above). But I knew there was
  only one way to see Miss Hollywood and my JOS friends again; win a spot in the
  National tournament. We hadn’t done it for the last two years, and that with
  stronger teams. But I was inspired now, for that and other reasons, and I worked
  HARD and got us the invite. So this Internet friendship made me fight harder in
  real life; not only was I learning more about myself, but I was becoming more
  successful as well.

  Have you caught the red flags yet as to where perhaps this
  wonderful Internet Intimacy with Miss Hollywood failed me? We’ll get to it next
  time, but for now, just focus on the positive. What's so good about being known and knowing someone else on the Internet? List away in the comments!

  *details have been toyed with to make the boring amusing

  • 9:53 pm
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