inside, outside

i spent hours playing with Mr. Potato Head when I was little. I don't really understand the fascination it held for me... i could spend hours putting arms on his nose and eyes on his ears and making him cross-dress (i am sure, if Freud encountered Mr. Potato Head, he would have alarming things to say about my psyche).

my son got a Mr. Potato Head for Christmas. First thing he did was give him a purse. Then he ran over him with a fire-truck.

today, not unlike yesterday

so i've been delaying the creation of my own blog ... as everybody's doing it.

i grew up on the net - and i did the net because it wasn't cool. the cool kids couldn't bother me there; i could disappear into my favorite chat rooms or bboards and post long soliloquy on the injustices i faced as a fairly honest, much misunderstood youth, with only the vaguest hint of melodram. we gloried in our critiques of culture and horrible poetry compositions and online rpgs. and best of all for me, being from a conservative area of the country where women were (are?) still told that the best thing for them to do is grow up and become a housewife, i finally had a refuge to hide from the rude questions from individuals who couldn't understand a girl who liked science. thank you, captain janeway.

i realized those glory days had passed when, after putting my newborn son to bed, i IMed a friend's daughter and she used teen net lingo i didn't understand. i wrote teen net lingo, damn you all, and i did not appreciate being left out of the loop...

gone are the days (well spent, mind you) when i kept up with my reading (books, as in the ones with paper) while i was waiting for web pages to download. insane amounts of pseudo-info now clog our super fast computers. now, everyone has a website. and i mean everyone. no longer the underground domain of the smart kids at the front of the class, now my beloved internet is overrun by the very people i was trying to avoid in the first place.

so what made me cave into the familiar, always haunting pressures of "everybody's doing it" and start my own damn blog?

i'm not really sure what the defining moment was. maybe it was the nostalgia i felt tonight, as i'm still awake at 1:43 in the morning and i have nothing better to do than surf the net. maybe it was the longing to again have a safe place to rant my thoughts and opinions where i was fairly certain i could do so in peace and quiet. it could have been the quarter-life crisis i'm told that like, everybody my age is facing, with the dawning realization that we are no longer youth.

or maybe it was just the growing awareness that though i've become more socially adept, self-aware, and confident... moving on to bigger and better things than the internet... i am still, at heart, a nerd.