Life before...

I've marveled about technology before. But I'm going to do it again.

Sometimes, I wish that we could go back to the "good ol' days" pre-Internet. My family had a word processor with an amber screen until I was a freshman in high school. Then, my dad bought a computer with a colored screen and a FAST 386 processor! It was incredible (dot matrix printer not forgotten)! And there was a word processing program on it, along with Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?. I would spend hours playing that one game and also just typing up stories and thoughts, etc. There was no Internet, no e-mail, no link to the outside world. It was just me, my thoughts, and my butt-kicking geography skills. Ah, those were the days.

And then, when I went to college I discovered the Internet and e-mail and my parents subscribed to AOL thinking they would be able to reach me by e-mail more readily than I was answering phone calls. (Funny aside: Mom once left a message on my dorm answering machine for me, but didn't call me by name and didn't identify herself, and my roommate was all laughing that some woman left lovey-dovey message for her boyfriend on our machine. I was a little embarrased by this. "That's my mom." "Oh.") Anyway, I would spend inordinate amounts of time in the computer lab on the second floor of North Russell surfing the net and doing stupid things like virtual dumpster diving (inspired by real-life adventures with Dad) and finding my true African name in the Louis Farrakhan African name generator (Saleem,for the record, though one time, I swear "Huggy Bear" came up when we put a friend's name in). When I came home for breaks, I would spend time in chat rooms on AOL. And I would ask myself, "What did I do before Internet?"

Nowadays, the question has changed to, "What did I do before blogging and Facebook?" Oh, how time has changed and technology has evolved. I don't spend a whole lot of time on FB these days, posting only every so often. I'm still trying to determine how narcissistic the practice really is (though for some reason, blogging doesn't come across that way in my mind). Since I gave up gaming on FB in December, I've spent a lot more time doing things offline. But I still log in to FB to see who picked their nose last, whose kid said something snarky, and who's being audited by the IRS (no kidding, a FB friend of mine is being audited!). It's so stupid. But women are nosy. And I'm a woman. Therefore, I'm nosy. I want to know about the little things going on in other people's lives...sometimes. Sometimes it's TMI. Really, it is. And I spend a lot of time catching up on my friends' blogs, even if I don't leave comments to prove it, wishing that people would update more often! So, yeah, that's it.

These thoughts were spawned by a 2.5 hour nap taken by the little one today as I tried to get some lesson plans completed, but ended up checking my e-mail and surfing FB for updates. Time wasted. Just like now. Except that at least I can search my blog postings later. Can't do that with FB that I know of.

Okay, time to go spend some time with my husband who has been out near the water with the Coast Guard Auxiliary all day.

Cheers.