Never Say Never

"What is it that you never ever thought you would write?"

That's the Sunday Scribblings theme o' the week, and no, it's not Sunday. It's Monday, September Eleventh. But for the sake of my newfound want and/or need to "take to the woods and live deliberately", I'm gonna write it now while eating a bowl of Cookie Crisp with a white plastic spoon. Yummy.

What I Thought I Would Never Write
by A. B. Chairiet

(See? Now it's official...Let‘s do this train of thought style, shall we? Yes, she says, as the soy-milk runs down her chin.)

I never thought I would be one of them. One of those internet geeks. People who spend so much time online, and for what? For the connection? The chat rooms? The pornography??

I never thought I'd be one of them, staying up all night, instant messaging total strangers at the age of fifteen, talking to men God-knows-what-age, and they're asking me to do what to my where with a hairbrush?? What now?! You've got to be kidding me!!

I was completely blown away at how perverse it all was. At how bazaar.

Yet how delightful it was to sit at a desk and type and say Yes, I'm doing that, though actually I wasn't. I was sitting with my girlfriends, and we're laughing at him, this pathetic stranger and why is he online??

Why are any of us online??

I'm glad I'm past the days of men asking me to stick certain things in certain places. The internet isn't a place for young girls. The older you get, though, the less and less men bug you. The more they actually want to talk to you. Connect with you. Write letters. Be involved.

Though eventually the sex comes back into play, and that's all well and good. I'm not anti-sex. The internet is here for millions of people for millions of reasons, and if you want to have a bit of fun while you're at it, then go right ahead. Just don't ask some fifteen year old to do dirty things to herself for your own personal entertainment. That's illegal, bad, and wrong.

I did the chat-rooms. I "faked" cyber-sex. Listened to free music via Napster. Talked to boys I actually knew via ICQ. I wrote emails. I shopped.

Years passed, and once I graduated from high school, I left the internet behind for a while. Until the age of twenty-two, I was almost completely offline.

In the beginning of 2005, I returned to the internet to find it in much better shape. Many changes took place: I used Google instead of AltaVista. I didn't do the chatrooms or ICQ at all. Nor did I go back to Napster. It wasn't free anymore. Where was I to get music? Make connections??

I never found a place for free music (not until recently, that is), though I did find the connection...in a little place called Stuckeyville. An online town, a fan-site if you will, for a television show I was obsessed with: Ed.

I needed that show and my obsession to distract me from my postpartum depression. And because of that need, because of my mind being so fixated in that place...that Ed-like place where it was all so nice and squeaky clean versus my reality that was full of the cries of a colicky baby...what happened next was inevitable:

I began writing again.

I wrote what I never thought I would write. What I didn't even know existed. A blog! My God, a blog. Yes!! What a wonderful idea...I'll write pieces, cover the show, tie in the events of my own life, and there you have it:

A blogger was born.

I never thought I would write a blog, be one of them, but I was and I did. Night after night, for five months, I wrote that blog 'til I finally felt the need to break away from the show and only write about myself. Tis the deadblog: the place where I truly learned how to write. And I had been writing since the age of four, though I quit when I got pregnant. I was too depressed. And it's funny how that's what lead me back.

I'm still writing.

I'm writing here now. The deadblog died, and then I killed it, though not for the lack of loving it, or all that came with it...

Inbetween the starting of the Stuckey-blog and the deadblog, and the ending of the deadblog and the starting of this one, I've met so many great people, and read so many great things, and wrote so many pieces and letters, that it makes my head spin just thinking of it all. I'm grateful. It's a once in an online-lifetime experience I'd never take back or trade for anything. It's taught me so much not only about writing, but about myself.

Who I really am.

I never thought I'd be one of them, those internet geeks who are here for what reason, we'll never know for sure, but it isn't all hairbrushes and sad lonely men. It's real people, really living and writing and connecting. I'm glad I wrote what I never thought I'd write:

This blog.