If I had to pick one thing in the entire world that has shaped my life, the most. I would have to pick, the internet.

Yes my friends… The internet has made my life what it is today.

AOL was ‘cool’ back in the late 90′s. Then I learned how to browse without the help of AOL while at college …

it all started in 1998

In 1998 I used simple programs to hack in to people’s computers. I didn’t know what I was doing at the time, the risk or the illegal-ness of it all. I was in college, I was young, I was stupid. I was a music major, not a computer major. But that switched after my first semester … b/c computers could DO SOOOO MUCH!! OMG. I was fascinated.

My college roomie (Amy) and I created a joint AIM account. Our screen name was Nutellllla. (5 L’s). In our bio/description we wrote how if the writing was in Pink, that was ME talking, and if it was in Blue, that was Amy talking and if it was in Purple — then we were both there chatting at the same time. OMG, soooo many freaks came out of the woodwork and chatted us up. It was fun though. B/C we were oober bored and we were orchestra and band geeks. You know how exciting that life can be *sarcasm*.

I had a cool computer according to the guys on campus. I had a Sony VAIO and it cost something like $3000+ at the time. I really didn’t have a clue, but I think my parents and I wanted something decent, and being part Japanese and all – we figured Sony would fit the bill. *more sarcasm*

I quickly grew bored of AIM and AOL, and discovered VPlaces which was a really awesome chat room. You created an avatar of yourself or whatever and it appeared in this room with a bunch of other people’s avatars. I remember spending hours working on my avatar and creating ones for other people. It was a big business in VPlaces. The other cool thing in this chat room was that there was this flying carpet thing. You would whip it out and other people could hop on and follow you around the internet, going to any site you navigated to … with you. It was cool shiz. I was trying to stay all anonymous so I didn’t put a ‘real’ photo of me up to use as my avatar until I was sure of the people in the chat. One can never be too sure…still. One day I got the guts up to do it and I put my HS Prom pic up (cropped out my ex-bf) and I was good to go. As soon as I did that I got an IM from some dude. His screen name was donmat23. I felt he was innocent enough b/c he didn’t chat me up expecting me to talk dirty or whatever… (which I learned was pretty damn common online, eck).

That IM convo eventually led to a phone call, which led to a meeting in person, which led to us moving in together. I left the music conservatory after about a year to be with donmat and decided that I wanted to study computers. I started up at my county college studying Scientific Programming. I don’t know what I was going to do with that, but since I was also practically paying for college myself I didn’t see the benefit of paying to take a ‘health elective’ (AKA GYM) and other nonsense classes and enrolled at the Chubb Institute in 2000. In 2001 I graduated — got a job in telecommunications (and I’m still working for the same company).

I eventually got engaged to donmat and then decided to call off the wedding. He wasn’t the one for me.

When that relationship ended, I wound up back on the net, on match dotcom. The site responsible for my current 6+ year adventure and subsequent marriage to TH.

Now there was a lot of ‘other’ internet adventures and exciting friends I found and met through the web. Other blogging platforms I’ve used to record my life-happenings.

I’ve been on the hunt for my old blogs. From 1998 I used opendiary.com, and then moved on to livejournal.com then on to my own site (all HTML, omg i was stupid) — then blogger — and now wordpress. I am going to pool together all my findings of my old sites and create a blog history.

I found some and the way I used to write is completely different. I think back then I was a little bit naive. I didn’t write explicit things, or use people’s names and things like that. But I wrote more nonsense, and shockingly, with that — I had more readers. LOL … who really cares about the details of someone else’s life?? People like a glimpse. I will need to summarize.

Which I apparently have yet to learn.