I was thinking about Netroots Nation - I have my tickets - and realized that it was during Memorial Day week-end five years ago that I got my first computer. It was a Dell laptop given to me by the friend of a friend who needed a more reliable one. The battery didn't work and it overheated sometimes - and sometimes frequently - but I wasn't planning on doing anything needing a lot of power, or a lot of anything really.
I was a little afraid at first. I wasn't computer-phobic, but it seemed very strange, a little like when I got my first dog when my son was little, and slept very lightly for the first few nights because there was this large beast in my house.
For the first week, the computer sat in its case under the desk while I looked at it warily from time to time. After a week, I took it out, plugged it in, and turned it on. After a couple of days, it started going to Yahoo search if the arrow thingy went all the way to the bottom of the screen. I wasn't paying for the internet, so at first I wasn't sure what was going on, but I searched gingerly for some sites I had heard of like Huffington Post and Daily Kos and read a little. I told someone about this, and they said I must have had a neighbor with a strong connection.
During the second week, I got myself an e-mail address.
There's been no turning back.
The computer was temperamental - it would overheat and sometimes I would hold it up to the cooler vent to cool it off; sometimes the screen froze, and scared me. It was all new. I joined Daily Kos sometime that summer. I discovered that people posted haiku diaries, and had fun, beginning to comment that way. Someone in one of those diaries said if I posted a limerick diary, he'd come. The next week I posted a limerick diary - my first. That was certainly less frightening than writing about politics!
At first, since they were called diaries, I thought you had to post something every day. Where did that name come from anyway? Gradually you all taught me how to do esoteric things like make links and copy and paste. Before that, I used to copy URLs with varying degrees of accuracy.
I was 60 at the time, and within the last year had had kidney cancer. Cancer rearranges a person's brain cells, I think. The world looks different, and priorities change. Discovering the internet and finding a voice became part of the shift for me, and an important part of my new world. I was ready for new things, and this community helped open them up for me. I stayed even though I frequented I/P diaries before the days of Meteor Blades' heroic moderation.
A number of my virtual friends have become real friends, and this will be my fifth Netroots Nation, thanks to some very good friends who financially help me get there, and it's become my annual vacation. I had gone many years without a vacation.
Anyway, that's what I've been thinking about. Thanks to those who have been part of this journey with me.