Once upon a time, in the depths of my past memories, I was an average 14 year old who went to school, got decent grades, and played video games with friends when not busy being a boy scout.
I also spent a monstrous amount of time surfing the internet - back then, we had just gotten a new DSL connection, and I could spend unlimited amounts of time connected to the modem without tying up the phone line.
I quickly discovered many ways to connect with people, and one of them was a particular chatroom I had found by googling (or, back then, "Altavista-ing) "chatroom". Of course, there were your regular people, mostly teenagers around my age (I hope!) discussing music, movies and your run-of-the-mill teenage banter. There were the creepers, who were sending countless number of private messages to the girls just to see them naked.
And there was me.
I don't really know why I was there in the first place. I guess it's because I felt a little lonely and I loved how easy it was to just start up a conversation with someone. I didn't even have to start the conversation with "hello". I usually came up with slightly punny introductions that would get me weird looks were they uttered face-to-face. Some of the people I messaged thought I was weird nonetheless, but once in a while, I would find someone who would reply with an equal amount of wittiness and I knew I'd found someone special.
Usually, the conversation would go on for a while before the inevitable question would pop up: "Do you have MSN?". Because, well, once you disconnected from the chatroom, you were likely fated to never see or hear from these people again, unless you were a regular.
Either way, MSN was always a constant. You could always depend on MSN Messsenger. The smiley selection was just... so appealing, and the introduction of voice clips in my later teenage years only furthered my adoration for this communication medium.
So, during one of my many 321Teenchat escapades, I met a girl named K. from New Zealand. She is one of my -original- internet friends, and I've known her for seven years to this day. SEVEN YEARS! And I've stayed in touch on and off with her for those seven years. I think I just loved the fact that she was from New Zealand, and I would always beg her to use her microphone to talk to me because I desperately wanted to hear her sweet accent.
K., being a wise and rather shy girl, never did such a thing... until two days ago.
I heard her voice for the first time after seven years of "knowing" her. Since we'd been Facebook friends for a while, she took the initiative to use the new Facebook video chat and actually gave me a call, and we had so much to talk about!
Unfortunately, it was around 4 am and I REALLY needed some sleep.
My conversations with her usually ended at such a time because I was always up late talking to her and I eventually needed to go to bed. She would rarely be on at normal conversational times for me, say, 9 pm, and so I would stay up late just to talk to her because her time zone was very strange indeed.
I have many, many other internet friends, but K. is probably my most ancient, and I do hope to see her someday. We're both mature enough now to actually travel the world without feeling awkward about it.
Anyway, this was what was on my mind today - let's hope my Saturday will be filled with fun-filled adventures and real-life socialness.
Hah...
Yeah right...
Karma Aspiration Langune Entité Iodinement Dérive Oisellerie Ulysse Guimauve Hurlement Salutaire Citronelle Ophilia Perspicace Ettore
2019-09 update: Removed first name for privacy reasons.
