I had an epiphany today.  Nothing earth shattering or life altering - I'm not that deep.  What was this stunning revelation?  It's actually pretty simple.  I am over the internet.  I'm not giving it up and joining a 12 step program, but it just no longer holds any fascination for me.  It is no longer a toy to play with, it's just a tool to get things done.

 I remember back in 1992 when I was in grad school and I found out I could use the VAX system to send my sister messages at her college in Vermont from my university in London.  That was way too cool, and despite the Pong-like interface, I was feeling high-tech à la Tron.  In 1995, my then beau introduced me to the internet and I discovered websites and online communities like the forums at  Epicurious.com and thought I had found heaven. Back then we had to pay per-minute charges for local calls made from our London flat, and I was surfing so much that I racked up a several hundred dollar phone bill in a month. You would have thought I was calling 976 numbers and swapping tips with a bored phone-sex operator.

By the time I returned to the US in 1996 I was a certifiable internet junkie.  I had discovered Bianca's Smut Shack, which was the internet's first web based chat site, and was a regular chatter there under the moniker of Wet.  Yeah, you heard me right.  I even had the much coveted email address of wet@hotmail.com.  Did we have cyber sex? Probably, but sorry I don't remember you.  It's also possible my grandmother was watching me chat with you too.  The old gal got such a giggle when she read your comment that "my prick is so hard it is pointing North and waving like a compass needle."

Image courtesy of bianca.com

After a few months of talking dirty and snarky (yes you can do both at the same time), I found a niche need that had to be filled.  Dozens of chatting couples were declaring that they were in love and wanted to be virtually married to their regular chat partners.  Being industrious,  I asked Thau, one of bianca.com's founders, if I could set-up a private chat service on the site and perform online virtual marriages.  He said go for it and Reverend Electra's Wedding Chapel was born.  I went so far as to go to the Universal Life Church's website and got myself  ordained.  I even issued marriage certificates!  I'm the devil with the details. I am also an ordained minister under my own name and have legally performed a marriage in the real world. Getting hitched soon? We'll talk.

Image Courtesy of thepalace.com's archives

Given that I have a limited attention span, I got bored with web based chat fairly quickly and moved on to virtual reality.  For a number of years I had been an online EFL teacher and started looking to virtual reality products to use as teaching tools.  You'd be surprised how hard it is to teach English by email without pictures.  I started with the bouncing M&M-like heads of The Palace.  It was a cool piece of graphic programming and made it so much easier to teach people in real-time using text and graphics. I worked with a couple of partners and pioneered a teaching program using the software that long outlived my fascination with the tool.

Scenes from a tea party in my virtual home circa 1997

From there I moved on to Activeworlds, the first interactive 3-D community that allowed participants to build virtual worlds, where I was to stay, under the moniker of Lucrezia Borgia, for a number of years.  I started out as a member of the community in 1996; by 1997 I was building and running all of their community programs and projects, and by 1998 I was their VP of Educational Technology and working with university professors around the world devising methods to use virtual reality to teach.  I was essentially living and working online. I got to wear a cool cartoonish avatar to work everyday, which meant my real world working wardrobe consisted largely of Dr. Dentons and Ugg boots.

For a while I played games online.  I was once a Level 10 Half-Elf Ranger in Everquest.  I was just no match for angry trolls and could never get to a high enough level to have the really sexy armor.  So I let myself be killed, never retrieved my body, and canceled my account.  I wonder if I am still laying in the woods in a far-off land with my bones pecked dry by virtual vultures.

However, in the last few years, I have found my fascination with the internet waning.  I just don't get the old charge or kick when I hear about a new technology or website. Most of the time I use it as an encyclopedia for quick reference or as a catalog to peruse and buy something specific. The other day, when I was tackling Verbal Remedy's request that we fellow bloggers go shopping online for her with an imaginary $10K budget, was the first time in eons I had actually shopped/surfed for sheer amusement. 

Most days I read my email, but cringe every time someone sends me "the latest and greatest" trend online, chain email, urban legend or video link.  People, please understand, while I find YouTube.com a great resource for my own writing activities, it is home to way more reality television than I am prepared to watch, and I want to beg you to stop sending me links.  Our universe is much more fucked up than I can bear to watch. I come to OS, write my posts, and read those of others. Periodically I check Facebook.  I thought, for a minute, that tools like Facebook would be the spark that got me interested again, but at this point I've blocked so many of their damn applications  and people who update their status every time they pee that my feed barely moves.  Not to mention that I'm ignoring so many friend requests that it is really more of an anti-social networking tool.

So, back to my epiphany. Like I said, it's nothing dramatic.  I'm not going off the grid or buying a typewriter.  I'm just pretty much over it.

Oh, and there's no way I'll be Twittering, so quit trying to follow me.