Bookworm meets the world wide web

I started using the internet in the mid or late '90s as a latchkey kid. My parents were both teachers who'd been to conferences toting how the future of communication/education would be internet based. Although very protective in other ways I had unfiltered access to the whatever was online starting at eleven or twelve.

I had an email address that got very little except a word-of-the-day and weird-history-daily emails. There was a fantasy short story website with a sort of labryrinthian layout that I'd wander through. I did searches for mythology stuff on altavista and snap.com. I'd kill the three or four hours until one of my parents got home easily.

None of my friends had the internet at home for two years or more, so the internet didn't really feel like communication as much as very magical sort of never-ending, choose-your-own-adventure book. It felt very foreign to me to get emails from real people I knew and to chat online with people I'd spoken to at lunch.

I used the internet even more when I first went to college. I'd never lived in a city before, and google was a major help filling my evenings & weekends with events, parks & museums. When I did start to have acquaintances from class I started to instant message in earnest for the first time, everyone in the major would be logged in if they were in their dorm room. It was less weird that calling someone's room & getting their crazy roommate or trusting your own messages to a roommate you'd known for a few weeks. When I started talking to someone special we talked online while I was at work (a secretary's secretary, a maker of copies, a fetcher or lunches) and from our dorms even through we were sitting in rooms less than a city block apart. In retrospect he probably knew I was shy.

I'm not sure now if my view of the internet is normal. I feel sort of out of touch with how much I'm supposed to be connected to others. When it was just me and people I didn't know I felt free to skip the internet for a day to paint or go to a friend's house instead of online. Now that I have two jobs, a partner, the ability to transport myself from place to place, I feel more obligated to be present online, but have less time to do it.