Sugar Britches

Let’s go back… waaaay back… back before lolcats, before Myspace and Youtube; hell, even before blogs.

The year was 1995; I remember it well.

Slick Willy was in the White House, but Monica hadn’t gone public yet. I was being dragged kicking and screaming into puberty. And that Christmas my father was feeling benevolent (I believe he was running a fever) and bought us our first home PC: a Packard Bell Legend POS.

There were few, if any, things this computer could do well. It would commit suicide if someone breathed too hard while it was booting up. When it did cooperate, I only used it to doodle in Microsoft Paint or play solitaire. But after I entered 9th grade, I started hearing the schoolyard talk about this magical place called “the internet”. After much cajoling on my part, dad signed us up for dial-up internet service. I lived in the country; big providers didn’t offer us any local access numbers, so we used the [now defunct] Surfsouth. Like most parents, mom and dad began by telling me “only 30 minutes a day” (ha!) so I used my time in the most productive ways possible: trolling newsgroups and participating in geeky role-playing games on mIRC. I even got me a dang ol’ ICQ number. Eight digits, bitches.

I rode the bus to school every day. Now that I was in high school, which was the last stop on the route, I was on the bus for almost an hour. There was a kid in my neighborhood who my brother and his friends gave the nickname “peanut butter”, because, well… as soon as he set foot on the bus, all we could smell was an odor that might resemble a jar of peanut butter that had been opened and left on a hot windowsill for a few days. One fateful morning, Peanut Butter got on the bus and the only available seat happened to be the one on which I was occupying half. Turns out he was a nice kid, and during the ride we began discussing our adventures on the world wide web. He mentioned that he was starting a website on Geocities, and– it gets better!– didn’t cost a penny.

Well, I got home that afternoon and the first thing I did was sign up for a Geocities account. A whopping 2mb of space, and it was mine, all mine! I went to create my first website and was perplexed by the seemingly indecipherable lines of HTML. But I was determined. I was fifteen years old. Most girls needed clothes or a car; I needed a website. I lived in a town of 10,000 people– how else was I going to meet others who shared my love of 1980’s gothic fashion and violent Japanese comic books? I set to work, and after acquiring a pirated copy of Paint Shop Pro 4, began teaching myself how to write code and create graphics.

Suffice to say, the “30 minutes a day” rule quickly got tossed out. My parents never complained, though– I think they were happy I was spending my weekends at home on the internet instead of out getting pregnant or doing meth.

As I neared my 16th birthday, I was running out of space on Geocities. I knew it was time to Move On Up To The East Side and pay for hosting. I ask you, what red-blooded American teenage girl doesn’t dream of saving her allowance money to buy a domain name? In the last 10 years, I’ve owned four computers (none of which was a Packard Bell) and five domains, kept countless online journals, and run a fairly active discussion forum. The summer I turned 18, I was selected as one of the winners in a Blogger.com template design contest; I got a t-shirt and everything. I almost majored in computer science when I was in college, but chose fine arts instead, out of fear that coding all day would kill my desire to maintain a website for personal amusement. And the math classes kind of scared me. Although with the current state of things (specifically the economic downturn which led to my present state of unemployment), perhaps programming would have been a more viable career option.

So really, the internet basically shaped my adolescent years. I met my first boyfriend on the internet. I discovered several of my current hobbies and interests through friends– many of whom I met via the internet. Some of my basic life philosophies have been shaped by articles I’ve read and discussions I’ve had on the internet. When you’re a teenager and don’t want to dress like everyone else, the internet beats any shopping mall. I’m actually not sure where I’d be right now, had I not gotten online and discovered that a world does exist outside of southwest Georgia.

And it’s funny just how far I have strayed from my small-town upbringing. But, despite not being religious, despite owning (and using) a passport, despite having an unnatural love for foods I can’t pronounce– now I’m returning to my roots and dedicating a blog to life in these fair southern states. So, if you’ve managed to get this far, stay tuned; hopefully it’ll just get better.

Y’all come back now!