Do you live on the northeast side and find that your internet has been dragging as of late? Hi. It’s me. I’m in yer internetz, stealin’ your bandwith.  (I accidentally misspelled that as “bandwitch” and nearly kept it. I totally justified it, thinking, yeah, I guess that would make me a bandwitch, cursing your network…. Stupid.)

I’m kind of embarrassed by how much anxiety I get when I can’t log on from home.  I freak out! Despite the fact that I have internet access during my entire work day! A part of me wants to be comfortable with unplugging and oh, I don’t know, READING.  The other part of me, the part that would kick that hippie’s ass, is highly concerned with the tweets of Smokey Robinson.

I’m also still without cable.  Obviously I should be netflixing, instead of my current tactic of, “I’m bored, I’m going to spend $20 on Mamma Mia, despite never having seen it.”  Can I just tell you the ATROCITY that is this movie? Holy balls, people. I’d say it ranks up into the Top Ten Worst Movies I’ve Ever Seen.  And I have an extremely high tolerance for musicals.   I’m really good at turning off that part of the brain that says, “WTF, why did everyone just turn into dancers all of a sudden?” and find pure joy in the fact that it’s absurd and wholesome and great. But this, MERYL? THIS? And I thought it impossible to make Pierce Brosnan less sexy, but I guess the trick is to make him sing.  Awkward. Even Mr. Darcy seemed out of place. Musical-movie FAIL. I so was insulted by this movie that I’ve thought about returning it. That would involve taking it back to Best Buy claiming that it’s faulty, exchanging it for a new unopened copy, and hawking that sucker at Walmart in exchange for cash.  That’s what this movie does to me.  It makes me do awful, deceitful things.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have about 100MBs of photos to upload to flickr. Hope you didn’t have any plans with the interwebs, neighbors.

It’s hard to believe that even though my parents suffer through dial-up at home, they were pretty early adopters of the teh internets, a la CompuServe, in the late eighties. I remember playing through text-only, choose-your-own adventure games, where’d you have to type in commands like, “pick up lantern” or “stab troll with knife.”

When I was ten, I was one of the first kids on my block to get America Online, which was a Christmas present from my parents. That was when you had a limited number of online hours per month, after which you were charged some hefty fees, as my dad quickly learned.  Like a typical pre-teen, I held up the phone line, chatting with random strangers, telling them I was sixteen and from California. And like typical parents of a pre-teen, my mom and dad would limit the number of AOL minutes, and that “Goodbye!” .wav when being blocked made me hate them.

File-sharing blew my mind with the advent of Napster. It took a full day to download “All For One” by Sting/Bryan Adams/Rod Stewart (the video of which took more time to find than I care to admit), but there was something amazing about liking a song, making a few clicks, and having it. For free.

Then obviously came the T1 line at the University and Audiogalaxy and updating my AIM away message when I WENT DOWN THE HALL TO PEE. And then, heaven forbid, BLOGGING.

I guess my point is, without even mentioning the true awesomeness of the interactive realm (you know, like insane data and research and community and blobbity blah), we’ve traveled light years in a few decades.

That’s what I often think about, when I see things like this:

Remember when they constantly referred to the internet as “the information superhighway”?  Clearly we know now that along every superhighway there is always something backward and subnormal, signs reading “2 Miles to the Jell-O Museum,” and “Next Exit, World’s Largest Clam.”

…having witnessed this.

Relatively NSFW, where “relatively” means don’t like, show it to your boss, but if a co-worker passes by and you have yr headphones on, you’re just going to look like a chatch who’s looking at a crappy music video.

Chris Zoladz turned me on to this simple gaming site named Sporcle.com. If you plotted my productivity on a line graph before and after the introduction of Sporcle to my life, you’d have what we call a STEEP STEEP DOWNWARD SLOPE.

Sporcle is chock-full of beat-the-clock, fill-in-the-blank games. You can test your skills at everything from naming Kevin Bacon movies (which, as it turns out, I suck at) to naming the countries of Europe (which, I also suck at).  You’d think my favorite would be “Bob Dylan” albums (trying to remember that 80s Dylan that I’ve tried to hard to forget), but my favorite is simply “US Presidents.”

As it turns out, trying to name all of the presidents is GREAT FUN (NERD NERD NERD) and also FRUSTRATING, because I MUST WIN. I MUST KNOW ALL OF THEM.  You learn very quickly that every US history class you’ve ever had only really highlighted our country’s best leaders.  The superstars, if you will. The Peyton Manning’s of the presidential world, those are the ones you remember right off the bat.  Then you remember the ones that messed shit up with wars and scandal and financial ruin, and then the ones that got shot or died in bathtubs.

Then you’re left with these blanks, representing men who have LED YOUR COUNTRY and you can’t remember their damn names.  I kept testing myself, going back and trying again, and I’d forget the same ones, every time.  Tyler, Taylor. You could hear me cursing from every room in my apartment, “GAAAAAAH, Millard Fillmore! William Henry Harrison!” Every time I’d get closer, remembering a few more, until I got 42/43.

…

…

I couldn’t stand it.  I pressed the “give up” button.

“CHESTER A. ARTHUR!” I spat. “WHO THE FUCK IS CHESTER A. ARTHUR?!? What did HE do?! He is the most worthless president EVERRRR.”

In spite of my rage, I had to find out something about Chester A. Arthur.  (There are a lot of things about myself that I need to work on, but my thirst for knowledge is certainly not one of them. It’s a quality that I hope I never never never lose — I feel like if I lose that quality I will just die. But I digress.)

So here are some things about our President Chester A. Arthur, per the World Wide Web:

• He was a “man of fashion.”
• He was nicknamed “the Gentleman Boss,” and “Dude President”
• He once caught an 80-pound bass.
• Robert Todd Lincoln (Abe’s son) was his Sec. of War
• He kind of looks like my dad.

And then, this:

Arther’s wife Ellen died of pneumonia on January 12, 1880, at the early age of 42, only twenty months before Arthur became President. Arthur stated that he would never remarry and, while in the White House, asked his sister Mary to assume certain social duties and help care for his daughter. President Arthur also had a memorial to his beloved “Nell”—a stained glass window was installed in St. John’s Episcopal Church within view of his office and had the church light it at night so he could look at it. The memorial remains to this day.

Oh, sad.

Chester A. Arthur, everybody.