Why talk about the present when you can talk about the past?
If you were to go back to the very beginning of this blog and read it, you'd get a pretty vivid picture of my life from late freshman year through sophomore year (though perhaps not a very accurate one). Something that is not documented, however, is my life during the main part of freshman year. Or, should I say, it is not documented here. I had a LiveJournal back then, and I was part of a whole different network of people.
Oh, I guess I've never talked about that here. I had Internet Friends. From sixth grade up through early tenth grade, the majority of my 'social' interactions took place online, with people whom I have never actually met. I'm not saying I didn't have a couple of good friends in real life, too, but one incident that really sticks out in my mind is something that took place early sophomore year. I was in two chatrooms: one full of real-life friends, and one full of internet-only friends. I had both windows open side by side on my screen, and I remember the painful realization that I preferred my internet friends. Or maybe 'preferred' isn't the word, maybe I just wished they were my real life friends. Anyway, it was something like that.
Looking back on it now (I have to be very careful in the next week to not overuse that sentence), I can understand that a little better. It wasn't necessarily that my internet friends were a better fit for me than my real life friends, or even that I liked them more. When you interact with someone online, you're missing a key component of being around that person. You're getting, maybe, depending on the person, 40% of their actual personality. And then you fill in the blanks. Or, sorry, I fill in the blanks. I don't want to speak for everyone here, but it's definitely been that way for me. I must have unconsciously filled in the parts I didn't know with things that I liked. I didn't know I was doing it then, but I'm sure of it now.
Much of what I do remember from freshman year takes place during second semester. A day goes like this: I wake up (sometimes with only the alarm clock, sometimes with my father's assistance), I shower, I eat breakfast, my dad drives me out to the bus stop and we wait, I get on the bus and listen to my CD player (I remember a lot of Warren Zevon), I look out the window on the way to school, I get to school and do the school thing, I eat lunch with Zach, Matt, and Chad (I used to think I was the odd man out in that group, but now I think maybe none of us really fit together), I do more of the school thing, I ride the bus home (these bus rides are less easily recalled than the morning rides), I go home, and I eat something, I do homework (maybe), then I get on AIM for most of the night.
I'm not going to talk in much detail about the specific people I "hung out" with (Peter, Alex, Meghan, Daisy, WPPWAH, Fudgie, Calli, Ben, etc.) or how we all go together in the first place (Neopets, then NothingButNeopets, which is a Neopets fan site with a forum), or all of the shit that happened between us (bitterness, betrayal, anger, "love", all sorts of shit that a fourteen-year-old boy shouldn't get drawn into but unavoidably does).
I am going to say this about freshman year, though: most of it happened before I got this blog, and I deleted most of that LiveJournal. So, it's not on the internet. And I guess that's something.
