expiration date 

i have much less internet life than i used to have. where did it go?

sometime in 1997, my life was only in the internet. as a chat addict, i spent over 18 hours on the net. i barely sleep. i have racoon eyes. but that’s ok, cause no one would see me with the dark circle around my eye. i would cook while chatting, eat while chatting, watch tv while chatting. i had tons of virtual friends, i had a few virtual crushes, and i had more virtual admirers than i had in real life. it was kinda pathetic now that i think about it.

almost everything that went bad on during my chatting period. i went thru a nasty break up with ari. he hated me. i prefer to interact with my virtual friends more than with my own boyfriend. he would come over from New York to visit me, arriving around midnight since he had to catch a late bus straight from work, only to find me sitting in front of the computer. i was glued on it and left the tired him alone in the living room watching TV. the worst of me came out during that time.

ari wasn’t the only person i dissapoint. that semester, my GPA was practically 0.0. i hardly go to school, and even if i was in the school building, i’ll be in the computer cluster, doing you-know-what. my parents were sad and frustrated. the strangest thing is they didn’t really yell at me.

chatting was addicting. and i was completely sucked into it, couldn’t come out and didn’t want to come out.

there are a few good things came out from the chatting period, though. one of them is i practice writing in english. since i hardly talk in real life (i was quite anti social), chatting gave me practice. i can make jokes in english and quite fluent in pouring my heart out in the internet. i also learn to type with my fingers in correct places when i was chatting. i now can type pretty fast.

another good thing i took from my chatting period was web design. i learn web coding and got a few bootlegged software from a chat friend who used to work on USweb/CKS (which turned to MarchFirst… and died). he was a web producer there and he would send me stuff and patiently teach me on how to code better. all those mouseover thing? he taught me that…

that leads into my career. after i graduate college, instead of pursuing engineering jobs (my major was mechanical engineering), i went to web design. worked as a junior designer, now i am a Director of Information Architect. well, until tuesday… then i’ll be a part-timer/konsultant.

in any case, i still hated those days. i hate it most because i ended up dissapointing people i love. people i care the most. i completely forgot about them and being extremely selfish. i still cry whenever i think about how i treated ari during that time.

i wish, by now, ari knows how much i appreciate him. he’s the best thing that have happened to me. i really do love him.