by Kelleys Creations

Finally! At age 36 I am getting my first computer. This was nine years ago. For over four years I had wanted to get a computer. What or who was holding me back? My husband. He wanted to wait even though we had the money. Story of our lives. Now that the economy is not the greatest, hey, I realize he’s right to save money.

I remember feeling excited and being anxious bringing the computer home. I’d almost compare it to bringing home our first baby–almost. When my husband and I were setting it up it was scary. We did not want to break anything on this futuristic technology thing.

Finally the computer was good to go! I remember e-mailing was so much fun. Here I was one of the biggest snail mail writers. I had twenty two pen pals. I could not wait to read what was going on in other people’s lives. I could not wait to write and tell people what was going on in our lives. Now I could get instant gratification! We could send photos to each other at the snap of a button. Wow. Life does not get any better than this, I thought.

I kept in touch with relatives and friends. Some people I used to only hear from at Christmas time. This was beyond awesome. Now I knew what they were doing over the weekend, I could see photos of their new baby, pets, new homes, etc.! I could share whatever I wanted with them, too.

I had fun searching online. Before I knew it, Google had become my brain. People would ask me a question, if I didn’t know it, Google did.

My husband would be up until midnight playing games online. He had to wake up at 4:00 a.m. for work! He could not help himself just as I could not. Computer addicts were being born right before our eyes.

After three months of having our computer, I decided to check out the chat rooms. I was so scared. I remember my heart racing as I clicked onto Yahoo Messenger and made it into a chat room. I used a fake name as you are supposed to, since there could be dangerous stalkers, yet it was still a female name. I could not believe all of the instant messages I got. Freaky messages at that. If you have been in a chat room, I am sure you know what I am talking about. India seems to have the loneliest men there are. The men want to talk and talk and beg you to stay online. Most do not have the best English and ask inappropriate things. They and other men will ask you “what you bra size?” Now that is good English, mind you. Of course, most men want you to send them pictures, preferably naked. I don’t think so, mister. Go to a naked woman website if you want that. They say that is not the same. Men like to be able to “talk” one on one with the woman they want to see naked.

As I am in the chat room, I get an instant message that my profile picture is triple XXX now! I freak out as my profile picture is of my husband, our three boys and I sitting on a fireplace at Christmas. Yes, I learned the hard way.

I was a newbie innocent chatter. I wanted to see what this cyber world was all about. I learned that at least 85%, make it 90% of men are not happily married. I could not believe it. So many men want to meet women on the sly. I had offers from men that would come to the state I live in and fly to meet me. Yes, married men. Of course, I declined since I am happily married with three children.

I got to talking to other females online and they had the same response. Hey, I met a lot of married women who have met men online so it is not just the males doing it! It works both ways.

This bit of information saddened me. It made me feel like the world is worse off than I ever thought. How can so many people be so unhappy? I know some men said they were staying in the relationship until their kids were grown. Some couples actually had an open relationship. Hey, some couples actually wanted a three-way. The majority of men said their woman pretty much ignored them. They made them not feel important anymore. They needed to feel loved, that they mattered and of course s-e-x was a big issue or lack thereof.

I was grateful and took this information to heart. I make sure every day my husband knows just how much I love him. I compliment him on his clothes, hug and kiss him. I thank him when he makes dinner or does other nice things for me and our family. I let him know he is appreciated. I do not take him for granted. We both tell each other a few times a day that we love each other.

I remember chatting in an instant message with a girl from Iran. I could not believe that she was talking to me! Me who is from the United States of America! We are not supposed to get along. I thanked her. She even typed, “We will let the leaders of our countries worry about that.” That day I smiled. I felt there was hope for the world.

I started getting a group of friends added to my Yahoo Messenger. It was kind of cool getting to know more and more people from all over the world. Since people fascinate me, this was right up my ally.

Our group of people started hanging out together in chat rooms. A lot of them had webcams which made it even more personal. I decided to get a webcam, too. This was more of a hassle if anything. I would get blasted with instant messages to turn on my webcam. If my webcam was on I would get blasted with messages from people so they could see me. Then there was the fact that I had to be vain. Hey, I am sure most people are when it comes to the webcam. I had to make sure I had my hair combed and my make up was on. Ugh. Not the thing I felt like doing. Gee, suddenly my webcam broke. Okay, not really, but I did not want to fix-up to talk on the computer. I wanted to have fun and chat with my friends.

After awhile, chatting became boring to me and I found blogging. Blogging on Yahoo 360 was the coolest. I love writing and I did not know how many phenomenal writers there are out in the world! Some of the poetry I read words cannot even describe how magical and beautiful it is. I love to write poetry and I realized I am just not that good! Being a medical transcriptionist I know quite a lot of words but how often is a Latin medical term used in poetry? If I wanted to become a great poet, I knew I had to start to read the Dictionary. I could learn three new words a day. Yes, that thought lasted about three minutes in my brain. (Mental note: Good idea to revive that idea. Put it on my bucket list.)

I made friends in California, New York, Italy, Canada, etc.! I could “see” the different ways we spoke. I loved looking at the photos people shared on their blog. It was like I was traveling around the world sitting in my comfortable leather chair.

The poets or fantastic photographers I would plan to visit at night. Sometimes I’d pour myself a glass of red wine and relax with all of the beauty. People gave me ideas to expand on my poetry and photography. I am grateful for that.

Other people shared their troubles in their blog. I felt bad for people who were having problems with their children. I learned a lot of things from reading other people’s ways of raising their children. Some what to do’s and some what NOT to do’s. I take all of this with a grain of salt and try my best with my own children. I pray for the parents who suffer from hard times.

I even came across a blog of a woman who’s child died. I cannot even fathom that thought. I know I cried when I saw that. She had pictures of her little girl that passed away with “Angel” written by it. My heart never fully recovered from reading and seeing that.

The nice thing about blogs is you can “lurk.” You can go read other people’s blogs even when you are not their online blog friend. That is, if the person keeps it visible to the public. A lot of folks do that. Just be careful what you write if you think that is the way you want to go. Write as if it would not matter if your family members or boss would read your blog. That can be hard to do especially if you had a bad day at work. If you are going to spew hateful words about your boss and job, make that specific blog private for yourself and/or your friends only. Trust me.

As I was lurking I learned another interesting thing. I am from Wisconsin and we write our words differently than say people from the south. I can definitely tell if a person is from another area that is of African American decent. Most people write the way they speak.

Clicking away blog to the next blog, I even came across cross-dressers. I guess they blog, too! Some like to show a lot of pictures with their dresses and bras on. Let us not forget the vibrant red lipstick most women do not wear. I found this very interesting and I felt bad like I was a fly on the wall peeking at something I should not have been peeking at. Now I have watched television shows where men have had sex changes and their family disowning them. I would never do that. If the person is in my family and I hold that person near and dear to my heart, I will still love that person as a man or woman. In other words, the gender of the person does not matter, it is the person inside.

I got to be friends with a girl that I thought had it made. She lived a different lifestyle than I did. She was gay and had a pretty girlfriend. She was very pretty, too. She ended up getting artificially inseminated and they found out they were going to have twins. The twins ended up being two cutie pie girls. We saw loads of pictures of the family. The two love birds lived in a quaint house on the beach in California. They loved to surf every morning until the babies were growing bigger and bigger in her stomach. I envied them; forgive me God, waking up to the crashing of the waves and gorgeous sunny weather. (Remember, I am from Wisconsin and our winters can be brutal and seemingly never-ending!)

I would wake up, grab a cup of caramel tea and look forward to reading about the morning of the surfers. Oh, and the blogger girlfriend was in a band. So fun at night, singing, getting paid to do what she loved…living the good life. While most of the world, including me, works in an office or factory.

One day this surfer girl wrote the most disturbing blog. She was not really this person! This person did not exist nor did this lifestyle. She wanted to show people you cannot always believe what you read. She had fun writing the blog and basically made it a story. Oh man, you should have seen the fumes fly! Some people were so angry that they wasted time reading her blog, while others thought that was true–it is the Internet. On the Internet you never know who you are talking to. While this was always in the back of my head, it was a rude awakening of a reminder! Needless to say, I deleted her off of my friends list.

I have followed friends that I got to know online through blogging and their dating. It was fun to see what the guy looked like and what they did on their date. I loved reading things the guy said to them. I always wondered in the back of my head, what would the guy think if he knew the girl was blogging about him and showing his picture?! Guess I do not have to worry about that one as I am married. I also know my husband does not blog. Glad I do not have to worry about this situation, although my husband should! Not really, I blog about him and everything I say about him is good. Well, except that one fight.

It was not really a fight. I bid on a piano at work. He did not want me to bid on the piano but all of my life I had wanted a piano. I made sure I was going to get the piano! Sure enough, I won it! My husband complained that I would never learn how to play it and it would just be a waste of space in our house. I assured him I would take piano lessons. I would learn how to play the piano by Christmas! We would all stand around the piano, just like in Lawrence Welk television shows, singing and then afterwards we would have hot chocolate. Paints a pretty picture, doesn’t it? Two years later, I have had five piano lessons and I have not practiced in over a year. I hate it when my husband is right!

While blogging I decided to check out eBay. It all looked so confusing at first and no way was I going to give out my credit card number. Well, not until my son and I became movie addicts of a certain thriller movie. I bought a lot of cool stuff to decorate his room in horror theme. Amongst the items I bought are a signed movie hat with eight of the people that were in the movie and/or produced it, first tickets to the movie and even a script of one of the movies. My son wants to work in the movie industry some day. I hope his dream becomes a reality for him.

A year later I have spent way too much money on eBay. Last year Lia Sophia products took a large chunk. This year over $1,000 of my hard earned money went to Silpada jewelry bidding. Once I started on eBay, I felt like I could buy anything around the world I wanted, that I could afford. Keep me off of eBay, please!

While blogging I met one of my now best friends. She lived one state away. She commented on one of my blogs that my brother was “hot“.  We were at his son’s birthday party and I shared pictures with my blogging friends.

One day she did a blog about the perfect man for her. I read it and it sounded just like my brother that she thought was hot! I let her know. She and I had all of these plans for the two of them. I called my divorced brother up and I took my laptop over to his house. (Yes, I have graduated to a laptop as the desktop computer was not enough!) I showed him her picture and he thought she was pretty. He wanted to meet her and she vice versa. He does not have a computer so this girl and I did all of the planning. She came up to Wisconsin and we met. It was so cool! I got to meet someone from the virtual world.

We all went over to my brother’s house and had a cook-out. Later my brother did fireworks. By the end of the evening the two of them were holding hands. I hit the jackpot and was queen matchmaker!

To make a long story short, she now lives in Wisconsin only ten minutes from me. My brother and her are no longer exclusively seeing each other. They are friends and see each other once in awhile. She and I are still great friends, thankfully!

People always say be very careful if you meet someone from online. There are many terrible stories out there. One of my online single friends said he went to meet a girl at a bar. They ended up going to her hotel room. He thought it was his lucky day. Needless to say, the girl had a boyfriend hiding in the hotel room. They ripped him off by stealing his wallet. I told him he is lucky to be alive. He agrees.

So many people have met a member of the opposite sex online. It all starts out innocent, or not so innocent. Before you know it, one of them is moving out of their spouse’s home and moving to a totally different state or country. I do not know how people can be that brave and give up everything! A majority of the time, this situation does not work out. Think of all the pain that is caused by this especially if there are children involved.

A happy ending to a love story online involved two single people I blogged with. The male is from Australia and the female was from the United States. She ended up moving to Australia. They just had their second baby. It is so heart warming to see photos of the now happily married couple and their precious family. I know her parents were not happy at all with this move. I am sure it is sad to them to not be able to hold their grandchildren. Both of them still blog although not as much as they used to with time constraints and real life responsibilities. I hope this marriage and family make it. It has been three years and they appear to be going strong. More power to them.

Another scary online story involves two people that fell in love. They shared intimate conversations and intimate sexy photos. Well, more times than not the couple breaks up and one of them, usually the male, threatens to show the sexy pictures to all of their blog friends. Of course the woman is offended and worried. She meant those photos for the love of her life, not every Tom, Dick and Harry to see. Thankfully, most of the men just threatened to show the photos and did not carry through with it, at least in the cases that I have seen. Be very careful with who you trust. You may feel and be in love at the time, but remember something down the road could happen to your romance and then you will have provocative pictures to worry and wonder about in someone else’s hands.

Online you can join groups with other people who share your interest. This is another fascinating thing about being online. I thought it was so cool when one of my classmates started up a group for our graduating class. So many of us joined and we all got to catch up after nineteen years! We shared photos in our group. We talked about what we were doing in our lives at this time. We shared so much. We all could not wait to meet for our twentieth class reunion! Once we were at our class reunion it felt like we all knew each other again and we had so much fun. No one wanted the night to end!

Since I love to write I joined writing groups. We share stories and critique them. We learn from each other.

There is just about any type of group online you can think of to join. Whatever is your hobby, you are sure to find others who share the same interest.

My friend who moved up here that was dating my brother ended up finding websites where we could write and make money. I had to check it out. I did join and I have one hundred and thirty three articles and poetry published. I continually make money every day on that website.

Then I found a website where you could read books to make money. I joined that and I get free books. That same website owner has another freelance writing website. I joined that and make a lot more money. This is perfect as I have always wanted to work from home and write. The computer has been my window to the world and with the good and bad it has helped me make my dreams come true.

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