TheBanyanTree: The State of My World as of Thursday Afternoon

[Julie Anna Teague]

Quoting Stew Young <youngmarketing at gmail.com>:

> Most of my social outlet comes via a computer screen. Truth be told, it has
> for a large chunk of my life. I got my first modem when in 1983 at the
> tender age of 12. Except for a few periods when I didn't have the cash for
> internet access, I've been on message boards, chat rooms, and emailing
> people for two-thirds of my life.

I'm laughing at you calling yourself "old school".  Ok, 300 baud 
modems, yes, that is considered old school, you little Gen X-er you.  
But I graduated from college in 1983 with a computer science degree, 
and talk about old school--we still used punch cards.  We ran them 
through a very large computer in the musty basement of an old building. 
  We flipped switches, indicating octal codes, on the front of this 
computer to debug our program.  And yes, damnitall, I walked a mile to 
school in the snow!  How did you know that?

> Today ? everywhere I went, somebody wanted to engage me.

There are those days on the internet.  There are those days in real 
life, but they are fewer and farther between, because people get more 
cocky and indignant behind a computer screen than they do in real life. 
  Even me, probably, although I tend towards being a WYSIWSYG kind of 
person, even on the internet. Many people are less in-your-face when 
they are actually in your face.  Hang in there Stew, and I hope you can 
cultivate one or two actual humans to interact with, even if it's 
smiling and chatting up the barista at the coffee shop, which sometimes 
is all any of us manage.  But I think we all need actual humans to 
bounce ourselves off of.

Julie