Stuff I Swore I'd Never Do on the Internet...

In my early online days, I was fascinated by the unending amount of information and topics on the internet. It was like having the entire world at your fingertips, merely a keystroke away. I often joked that if I ever got a computer at home, I'd never leave the house again.

Frankly, that scared me a lot, because I knew people who pretty much didn't leave the warm glowing light of their monitor for weeks at a time. Their entire lives seemed to be filled with chat rooms, playing games online, and varying degrees of internet pornography.

And I'll admit I poked light-hearted fun at them. I remember driving friends home from City Lights (our hangout of the moment), and laughing to myself because one of our friends never went out with us because he was too involved in a multi-user dungeon system. Every night we'd drive past his house, and no matter what time it was, his bedroom light was always on. We took to yelling "Get off the 'net, Vahn!" out the window as we passed. (Sorry, Vahn, but we did. You know I still love you, right? And why'd you password protect your page?)

Another of my friends discovered the chat rooms and soon had little to talk about except the 18-year-old girls in Australia he was chatting with in the wee hours of the morning. I took extreme pleasure in pointing out that, for all he knew, that hot little goth chick in Melbourne could just as easily be a 57-year-old hairy backed man named Myron who lived in Iowa.

So I made up a brief list of things that I would do with my computer. I would never play games online. I would never download any Instant Messenger software. I would never chat. I would never reveal information about myself to complete strangers. I would never buy stuff online. And internet porn... ew. Forget it.

Was I naïve or what?

I did most of my holiday shopping online last year. I also purchased a live internet-only Eels album from their website (it was a bargain, and has become one of my favorite CDs). And since I live nowhere near Red Bank, New Jersey, I opted to buy my Jay and Silent Bob action figures from the online Secret Stash.

I held out for pretty long on the online games thing. And then Zappagirl taught me how to play spades. Suddenly I found myself playing cards with folks all over the country late into the night. And as if that wasn't bad enough, the card game had a chat function. So now I can talk to the person whose bid I'm messing up! Zappagirl and I spent one night giving relationship advice to a fellow player in North Carolina over the course of many hands of cards and entirely too much coffee and wine.

(I also spent the better part of a few weeks playing Grim Fandango, but I am happy to report that I finished the game and have now moved past the Ninth Underworld and am happily enjoying my afterlife. Whee!)

As for the "revealing information about myself" thing... well, you're reading this post, aren't you? Between that and the fact that there is someone whom I've never met in New York who knows my secret identity, I'd say that the privacy issue is pretty much dead and buried. (The person in New York is sworn to secrecy, and if he spills the beans, I will have to distribute his cel phone number to every unsavory person I meet. Just kidding, GeekMan. Hope you're enjoying your vacation.)

This afternoon, I broke on the Instant Messenger thing. Roger Mexico and I often spend late nights exchanging emails (in an effort to keep long distance bills under control), but the amount of time between replies often means conversations will take 2-3 hours. We'd kicked around the IM idea, and last night he gave me a homework assignment to download the software. 15 hours later, mission accomplished. Except he hasn't told me what his screenname is yet, so for the moment it's a useless icon on my system.

I do want to note that when I set these now-broken rules for myself, it wasn't that I was looking down upon the people that I knew who chatted or played games online or whatever. I just felt that there was a fine line between making friends on the internet and becoming an online junkie. With some of my friends, they crossed that line and never left the house. As a result, I became less close with those people. It got to a point where I had very little in common with one of those friends, and I found myself struggling for a common point of interest that didn't involve a lengthy story about what Kimmi420 (not an actual screenname) did last night in the chat room.

So does the fact that I've gone back on all of my self-imposed rules mean that I'm a complete hypocrite, or does it mean that I've tested the waters of the internet, and now feel more comfortable in venturing forth to the deep end instead of mucking about in the shallow end?

I don't know the answer. Perhaps I'll go play some cards and ask my new friend in North Carolina for advice while busting his nil hand.

(And for all of you pervs out there who are wondering about the online porn thing, I do not frequent the "Hot Horny College Girls" pages that Hotmail continually spams me with, but I have been known to occasionally read some online erotica. There. Are you happy? I'm a 34-year-old single woman, and Harlequin romances don't do it for me. Sorry, Mom.)