Internet Puberty

My sentiments exactly.

Listen everyone. All five of you. Two days ago I used blog as a verb. I have been known to show Youtube videos in my classroom. I edited something on Wikipedia last week. Things are happening that I don't entirely understand...like when changing in gym class suddenly became a thing of horror.

But just like when these two perfectly shaped behemoth enchantresses began to grow on my chest in fifth grade, I am coming to accept the fact that the internet can be useful. Given my age, I SHOULD be one of the kids who grew up right alongside the internet. But I didn't even have cable television until age 9 or 10. A computer?! A computer is on the list of things we requested as children, sure. And it met my mother's only response to inquiries about material possessions. She would throw her head back and bellow, "You can't always get what you want...but if you try sometimes..." and raise her eyebrows. We would stare back, forced to glumly admit that we had what we needed.

When I was a teenager I could walk a mile and a half to my best friend's house, and she had the internet. But she also had a pool. So I squandered my only pre-adulthood chance to get acquainted with this...this "internet" for the sweet cool chlorine bath out back. We spent entire summers on floats shaped like alligators, eating sandwiches made from white bread and mustard. At night, the neighborhood convened in giant games of capture the flag. I never had to go home and I never had to go on the internet. It was perfect.

Thus, I went to college having used email once or twice and able to type. I sailed through college as a writing major, researching the depths of my own imagination. Sinking into the glorious world of fiction. All my papers were composed on collections of loose leaf paper, napkins, in the margins of other books. I would gather them up, spread them out on a table at the library, and type them in one shot. My thesis was written almost entirely at a dusty old man's bar three doors down from the library. I took to drinking red wine and letting the neighborhood regulars listen to late-night paragraphs of my work. This sort of madness suited my college identity rather well. There were people around who thought I was a crazy Luddite. There were the "media studies" kids, who to me were just as crazy as the theater arts kids. Their art wasn't my art and I wasn't interested in being anything other than a writer. I couldn't understand what the hell was so interesting about the computer. I could spend six weeks in a tent with nothing but a copy of Babylon, Revisited and not get bored. There were whole worlds in single sentences, what the hell did you need a computer for?!

Then I went to grad school. Oh fuck. These people get their research on. Here, a computer becomes a necessary tool. Syllabus: online. Class discussions: online. Test results: online. Okay, okay. I give. I purchased a computer. An adorable little laptop. It plays music; it plays movies; I can send email from the toilet. These are useful, enjoyable things.

HOWEVER I still did not really grasp the extent to which people engaged with this "internet." I thought I did. But I did not.

There is a bunch of knowledge out there that seems ubiquitous. I take great pleasure in being ignorant of most of it. People magazine is a collection of beautiful strangers; I know nothing about Hollywood and all that noise. But this is the conscious, deliberate result of watching almost zero movies and refusing to own a television. Recently, I have been blindsided by a whole other world of things to which I have been blind. Perhaps you are familiar with the website whose charming assault on grammar involves photographed cats. Until recently, I knew only the "Hang in there Baby" cat. Apparently, cats and captions have been married for some time on the internet and I had no idea. These cats are everywhere. Literally everyone knew about this except me. As it is with any new knowledge, I am starting to notice references to these grammatically horrifying pictures all over creation. I feel I have joined some other realm. I have moved to the lunch table where the girls talk about periods and boys and shaving their legs instead of...of...whatever we talked about before that. I have got internet pubes. And with them comes all the uncertainty and weirdness of that first real bout with adulthood in grade school. The internet awkward phase. iAcne.

Thanks to my workplace, my status as computer pubescent is paradoxical. No matter how tech-inept I may be, simply by virtue of my twentysomethingness and my coworkers' babyboomerness, I am The Resident Computer Genius. Countless are the times I have heard: "Kelly, you're good at computers..." followed by a request to, say, explain why the machine was suddenly "typing in only capital letters." My love for learning is second only to my love for knowing things my coworkers don't, so this works out for all of us.

This is a recurring theme with me, this being dragged into my generation. At a sleepover in grade school I remember sleeping on some girl's New Kids on the Block sheets wondering, self-consciously, "Who the hell are these guys?" When my girlfriends were making mixed cds I was still pushing the speakers of my turntable up to a taperecorder, recording all my Beatles albums onto cassettes. At a birthday party when everyone went to see Ace Ventura Pet Detective, I left them and watched Mrs. Doubtfire by myself. I identified with middle aged divorcees, it seems. I watched The Breakfast Club for the first time three years ago, yet I owned a copy of Gone with the Wind by eighth grade. I denied being a member of my own generation.

This has made for a great time in adulthood! Two years ago I started listening to Radiohead and Pearl Jam. They are GREAT! While everyone else who grew up in the eighties actually GREW UP IN THE EIGHTIES, I created a little world for myself and grew up in the sixties and seventies. Looking back, this was a smart decision on my part. So, now I'm using blog as a verb. One thing is for sure, though, I will retain my grammatical prowess, and resist the temptation to find subject verb disagreements cute.