Consumer warning: The following post is very long and overly introspective. If you are pregnant, may become pregnant, have a known heart condition or have had previous adverse reaction to excessive introspection please consult your physician before continuing. The rest of you, well, you might wanna go pee and grab a snack and drink now. The next stop could be a while. You’ve been warned. We now resume our regularly scheduled posting…

So I’ve made it this far in life without blogging which is unusual considering I am (a) a hands on technology guy who specializes in things internet and (b) a motor mouth. It would seem the medium was made for me, and yet I haven’t taken the plunge until now. Why? Well, for much the same reason as I refuse to have a myspace page*: Both blogging and myspace seem to be banal, navel gazing places each with a generous helping of narcissism. To be fair, there are many many blogs that are very topical and informative; those aren’t the ones I’m talking about. I’m talking about the ones where the blogger has the audacity to think that others give a crap about their random musings and introspection. In other words, a lot like this one.

So, back to the question of why now? Well, the short answer is that I’m not entirely sure, though I do have some suspicions which I will get to presently. But first, let me tell you a little about who I am just to provide context. Allow me to lift my shirt just a wee bit so I can see my navel…

I am a 40 year old guy with a great wife (Christy) and three beautiful children (Rachel – 19, Courtney – 6 and Justin – 3) and I am a tech geek to the extent that it borders on obsessive. I’ve been in the tech industry for very close to 30 of my 40 years doing everything from programming to consulting. I even owned an ISP for a while in the early-mid 90’s when this whole Internet thingy was getting off the ground commercially. Back when men were men, HTML was hand coded and there were still more discussion forums than porn sites on the ‘net. These days I make my living in the computer security industry. Aside from work and family, I fly little airplanes and scuba-dive and do many other things to entertain myself, but my biggest passion is my photography. I even teach Photoshop at a local photography school on weekends. The truth is, if I could make the money as a photographer that I do in my current gig I would make the change in a heartbeat. Count on photography being a frequent topic here should I continue on with this navel gazing exercise and should you return to it if I do. But I digress.

OK, enough background, back to those reasons I’ve suddenly taken up blogging. I suspect one of the reasons is that I turned 40 just a couple of weeks ago, which is a bit of a wakeup call for anyone. While I’m not one to focus on my age too much, or one to get upset about birthdays ending in zero, this one did cause me to think and reflect more than usual. I’m not saying I freaked out. I didn’t come unglued. I didn’t even get upset, depressed, bummed out, dejected, despondent, down or down and out, downcast, downhearted, down in the dumps, down in the mouth, glum, lugubrious, melancholy, moody, morose or suicidal. I just started thinking is all. I’m approaching the halfway mark in my life and I stopped to consider how I had spent and was spending that time. I know, I know, what a horrible cliché. The truth is, I still feel like I’m 20(ish) but the bigger truth is that I’m not. Rather than bore you with the tedious details, let me summarize the conclusion I reached after much careful deliberation: z Z Z Z z… ‘nuf said.

As much as I am loath to quote Kid Rock I feel compelled to now. This morning while driving to work I caught his new(ish) song “All Summer Long” on the radio. Though I’d heard the song a number of times, I’d not listened to the words before. The opening lines were “It was 1989, my thoughts were short my hair was long. Caught somewhere between a boy and man.” Ignoring for a moment that the song itself is like a badly arranged marriage between “Werewolves of London” and “Sweet Home Alabama“, that lyric really resonated with me. While for me the year would have been a bit earlier than 1989, I recognized a bit of myself in it. I’m proud to say that I’ve come a long long way from that time and have all the trappings to show for it and that’s all good, but looking back at that long haired boy I realized that he was a lot more fun than the old guy I see in my mirror every morning. While I recognize that part of growing up necessitates losing some of that zest of adolescence, I also think that losing it completely lands you in a rut while life happily passes you by. Well, welcome to my rut.

It is really just a case of not really living life, I guess. Before anyone jumps in and starts pointing out how I am forgetting my wonderful family and great job and astonishing good looks <crickets> OK, my family and my job, let me head you off. I’m not saying my life isn’t good; It is. God has blessed me with far more than I deserve, frankly. But I’m looking back over the last several years and can pick out very few remarkable days. Tons of good days and even a few great ones, but very few remarkable ones. The rut I’m in is a comfortable one but comfort isn’t everything. I really think you need to leave that flaming bag of poo on someone’s doorstep from time to time. You need to skip work to go do something interesting. You need to make that impulsive trip. You need to be a little irresponsible from time to time.

Even since my wife and I married the changes are significant. “Back then” we would, well, we would do lots of things we wouldn’t now. I could write several more pages on that subject alone. Like the evening, while living in Bradenton, FL (just south of Tampa), when we saw on the 11 PM news that the space shuttle was launching at 2 AM; After all of 30 seconds discussion we were in the car and off on an adventure. We arrived on the other coast with only minutes to spare, watched the shuttle lift off (amazing at night, btw) and headed back toward Bradenton. After stopping for a while at Denny’s in Orlando we headed home and it was daylight by the time we arrived. Did we both still have to work that day? You bet. Were we beat? Oh yeah. But, you know, this many years later I can still recall the smell of that Denny’s and the wonderment of seeing the shuttle turn the night sky briefly to day. I can still recall specific snatches of conversations we had that night. And it still makes me smile. The memories of the shuttle are secondary to the trip itself. That was an exceptional day.

So, what, you may ask, does blogging have to do with me having a dull life? Well, I’m glad you asked. There is a saying in my industry: “If you don’t measure it, you can’t fix it.” So, in a sense, this blog is my attempt at measuring my life. My hope is that in trying to put what is going on in my life to words, I will have to evaluate it much more closely than I do now. While the changes don’t all have to be grand gestures or wild adventures, those aren’t a bad thing either. What happens from here out will account for a large part of how my two youngest remember their childhood and, equally important, how Christy and I will remember those years after we’ve relegated ourselves to the rockers on the porch. Seems to me that that would be a terrible time to discover your regrets.

The other catalyst that leads me here is a bit more complicated. You see… well… I sorta met a girl. What a great line, huh? But it got your attention, didn’t it? Allow me to explain. But that, too requires a little backstopping.

I’ve never looked at the internet as a good social medium. In fact, quite the opposite. I think it has done a marvelous job of making a big group of very well connected strangers. You don’t know anyone you meet on the Internet. Not really. You can’t look into their eyes or read their body language or hear the inflections in their voice; those things that impart meaning beyond the literal, those things that make it ‘human’. Those things are what connect us. Yet with Internet friends you see only what they choose to show you, and a flat, two dimensional representation of even that. It is just oh so surface deep.

To be perfectly blunt, every time I heard of people who made “best friends” or worse yet met “soul mates” on the Internet I couldn’t escape the mental imagery of fat ladies in corsets and balding men with profile pictures Photoshopped beyond recognition or ripped from some male model’s site. And I couldn’t help but wonder if those couples who met on the Internet and ended up married were just sad, lonely souls who would take whatever came their way. Honestly, I really didn’t think it possible to really, truly connect on the internet romantically or platonically.

Now, the more astute reader will have noticed the extensive use of the past tense in the preceding paragraph, strongly implying that I was wrong. Yeah, I know. Shocking, huh?

One more flashback, then I swear I’ll keep it moving forward in time, however painfully slow. Before we begin this final journey back in time, let me apologize for the length of this particular detour. It includes a lot of minutiae that leads to a final point. The journey is long, but it does have a destination. So, that said, cue dream sequence music and off at a tangent we go:

Perhaps 6 or 8 months back my 6 year old, Courtney, was seduced by the marketing geniuses at Disney (a.k.a. The Evil Empire) into trying their online game called ToonTown. ToonTown is a kid oriented and kid safe MMOG (Massively Multiplayer Online Game). In other words, World Of WarCraft, just with fluffy bunnies and kitty cats. Seriously, though, they’ve done a phenomenal job at taking a concept that has traditionally been expressed in terms of violence and wizardry and packaged it in a way that is appropriate for young children, using 1930’s styled cartoon cats, mice, dogs, etc instead of warlocks and wizards. They throw cream pies at innocuous villans who “can’t take a joke” rather than slaying all comers with swords, chainsaws, pitchforks, rabid dogs, really angry ‘Ellen’ fans, etc. All the components of the other, adult oriented MMOGs are there, only in G-rated versions with bright colors and a kid-safe chat mechanism. It is really remarkable, actually. Really addictive too, it turns out.

I started playing with Courtney initially but soon found myself sucked into the depths of the game. Before long I’d built a ‘big’ toon (The characters you play are called toons). Put another way, I had progressed my character to a level where he could take on much larger and more dangerous tasks than newer toons. Not unlike other MMOGs, you build your characters strength and endurance over time. Unfortunately that same concept breeds a somewhat classist environment where ‘big’ toons don’t want to be bothered by ‘little’ toons and to some degree you have to be like that in general or you end up spending all your time helping little toons complete tasks that you long ago completed; a great boon for them since you make the job easy for them, but not terribly exciting for you, the big toon. Having said that, I don’t believe that little toons are somehow beneath big toons and, time permitting, I would help out a random little toon pretty often. It cost me nothing more than a few minutes and they are done with a task that might have taken them hours. Given that any little toon could just as easily be one of my kids or yours, it was actually gratifying to help them out.

Such was the case a number of months ago when I met two little toons that were very cute little matching brown bunnies named “Sugar” and “Spice”. I thought it was really quite clever and terribly cute so I embarked on a task with them. Once into the task it became immediately apparent that they were far more experienced players than their toons’ stature would suggest. The played very smart and were faster at SpeedChat (the list of kid safe pre-chosen phrases provided to communicate) than anyone I’d met in the game. Because of that, I ‘friended’ them which links you together in the game in such a way that you fan later find each other in the vastness of the game space. My assumption was that they were more experienced players who had big toons themselves, but were working on leveling up new toons. That would later prove to be the case, but I’m getting ahead of myself.

Over time I began to make ‘secret friends’ which is the ToonTown term for friends you can actually chat with by typing rather than using pre-chosen phrases. Doing so is really quite involved and complex because you have to work very hard to circumvent the safe-guards Disney built in to ensure this open chat was only possible between people who you actually knew in real life. It is so complex, in fact, that it really does generally preclude younger children from getting around those barriers, which is a good thing in my book. As I met and made additional secret friends I discovered, much to my surprise, that perhaps half the players I encountered were actually adults. Of course, if you are really, really good at math and perhaps have a good scientific calculator at hand you can probably work out from the above statement that somewhere around half of the players I met were not adults. It was really quite delicate. I made a point of informing new secret friends right away that I was an adult so they wouldn’t have wrong expectations. Conversely, I never asked any of them for their age, location, etc. It was a need to know environment as far as I was concerned, and I didn’t need to know. Put a thumb there and we will come back to that.

As we near the end of this painfully long tangent we come to a point where I ended up making secret friends with those two cute little bunnies I’d met a couple of months before. They were every bit as smart and funny in open chat as they had been in the limited SpeedChat. Far more so, in fact. We got along swimmingly and began chatting more often as time progressed. Since I never ask ages and neither Sugar nor Spice had volunteered theirs I didn’t really know how old they were. After talking to someone for a fairly short period I am usually able to peg their age to within a couple of years and I pretty quickly had them mentally pegged somewhere in their early to mid twenties. They were (are) both very articulate and mature and both seemed to have a true moral compass to a degree you don’t often see in younger people these days. They were both fun and upbeat and always quick to chat. I really liked them both a lot before making secret friends, but being able to really chat only reinforced that. In short, they were very likeable, so they very quickly became two of my favorite people in the game.

Because my jobs have, for many years now, involved troubleshooting of very large, very complex systems I’ve developed the ability to, in fact the habit of, collecting stray bits of information over time and incorporating them into a larger picture. The little details are usually where the trouble is ultimately revealed. It is something I do anymore without any conscious thought or effort. It just sort of happens. Well, all of this conjecture about the two bunnies’ general good nature emerged over numerous hours chatting with them both in groups and one on one at various times. Unfortunately, during those same hours of chatting I started picking up those little tidbits of harmless information about them and began to form a picture that caused me no little amount of consternation. You see, I ultimately heard enough little things that, when weighed as a whole, left me no doubt that they were actually sisters in their mid to late teens. I would have bet money on it, and would have won as it turns out.

See, the problem was that, over time, the older of the two sisters, Sugar (real names are not really important here) and I began chatting more and more and discovered that we had a great deal in common in both personality and world views. Perhaps more accurately, we were both motor mouths, thought an awful lot alike and had very similar personalities. It was as if we were instant old friends. If you’ve ever met someone who was just comfortable to talk to from the moment you met then you know what I mean. As our chats became longer over time it really shook my view of the internet as a social medium. We really connected in a way unlike any of the other ‘friends’ I’d made in my time on the internet. Unfortunately I discovered that connectedness around the same time I pieced together their ages which presented no small problem. What in the heck was I doing chatting with some teenage girl on the internet? Hasn’t DateLine made whole specials about these sorts of things? I have a 19 year old daughter who has just moved out on her own and I still wouldn’t like her talking to some 40 year old guy. But the fact remained that I really liked her a lot.

I suspect that, by now, many of you are picturing the rose petal scene from “American Beauty” or, in fact, larger portions of the plot. All I can say to you is that you should be ashamed of yourself. OK, probably not. I would (and have) thought the same things about others. I can assure you that my intentions are pure and not in the least ‘romantic’, I just enjoy talking to her. I think of her as a good friend. A good friend who happens to be a teenage girl, however improbable that is. Yeah, I don’t expect you to entirely buy that, and I’m not sure I would in your place but that doesn’t make it less true.

Like I said before, I didn’t believe any of this was really possible until it happened to me. I didn’t think you could really connect in a real way over the internet, much less with someone less than half your age. My online world view had been shaken at its core. I know that may seem dramatic, but it was a subject I’d given a great deal of thought to over the years and I was sure I was right. I felt like the skeptic farmer who has just encountered a UFO on the back 40. He is the same person but is now a believer, which makes him a nut to the rest of the world. Nothing actually changed but his perception. (disclaimer: the preceeding simile is for illustrative purposes only. I happen to think claims of UFO close encounters are complete crap and those making them are complete whack jobs.)

I was honest with her about my discomfort at the whole situation and we’ve talked a lot about it. In fact, she and I have engaged in extensive navel gazing (each at our own navel, each others’ would be way inappropriate) regarding our fast friendship. It still doesn’t make sense to either of us but we both felt the same connection as we started chatting early on. So lacking any rational explanation allow me play Mulder to your Sculley. Our collective best speculation is that our improbable friendship stems from any number of factors. Most fundamentally, I think it is a likeness in personality; in how we deal with problems, relate to people and perceive events that pertain to each of us. We often type the same thing at the same time, almost verbatim. It is really quite eerie.

That alone doesn’t explain the leap over the considerable gap in age. That leap is probably possible in large part because age isn’t immediately apparent on the internet and we made that initial connection with each of us thinking the other to be much closer to our own age. And, in fact, even now she is old for her age (and everyone who has met her in the game has the same impression, not just me) and I am young for mine. That is, I refuse to get old just because I am aging. And I think the final major piece in the puzzle is that she reminds me a lot of my own daughter, Rachel. They are similar in age and both exceed their age in maturity and judgment. Sugar jokes that I’m the online uncle she never had and I send her off to bed when she is on too late. She doesn’t actually go. Rather, she laughs at me (and I suspect she also rolls her eyes, though I have no proof) which only reinforces her resemblance to my own daughter. If you don’t know me and Rachel then that may not seem like a big deal, but it is. Rachel is one of the neatest people I know and one of my favorite people to talk to. She and I are very close and she has my undying love and affection so that resemblance certainly didn’t hurt. In fact, it is a real shame that they will never meet. I suspect they would be fast friends as well.

So again, we are back to why I’ve suddenly decided to blog and what this girl might have to do with it. Well, to be honest that isn’t easy to explain. I am still wrestling with this most unlikely friendship on some level. Beyond my own personal struggles, it is unusual in many other ways. We feel close enough to share and discuss problems from real life, but I don’t even know what state she lives in. We cut up and goof off like old friends, yet I don’t know her last name. I am always happy to see her, though I will likely never know what she looks like. I’m virtually certain she is in her late teens, but I don’t know her actual age. All of that is as I would have it, by the way. Well, more accurately, no matter how I wish it were, it is as it has to be. I’ve told her I don’t need to know any of those things and that she should assume anyone (including me) she meets online is a potential threat (which she already knew). And for her that is true.

She has to weigh every word she says because seemingly innocuous information often reveals more than you intend. And yet, she is doing this while discussing life issues she wouldn’t discuss with most people she knows in real life. In fact, about some things I suspect she has opened up to me more than she has with all but a very few real, live people. So she entrusts me with information almost no one else knows while withholding that which many others know. Now that is ironic. Alanis Morissette, take note.

Sugar had a great quote about what trust is that I don’t recall exactly but it was something like “Trust is giving someone the ability to break you and having faith that they won’t.” I thought that was one of the best definitions of trust I’ve seen yet it somehow falls short in an online world. And, yet, we continue chatting and the age difference becomes more abstract and more academic for both of us. Given that this is a strictly online thing, I’m OK with that.

I find this bizarre balancing act between ultimate trust and mistrust at the same time hard to juggle, which brings me back to this blog. This problem and others like them are so uniquely cyberspace that this seems the appropriate place to discuss them. More than that, though is my forced re-evaluation of the Internet as a real social conduit. I don’t make friends easily or often even in real life and so I still think the odds of finding someone you really connect with online is exceedingly rare. But I am forced to concede that it is possible. With that shift in perception, my feelings about blogging have also shifted a bit and so here I am, writing a blog entry. I still refuse to get a myspace page, though*.

If you’ve skipped to the end to see if there is a point, let me summarize by saying that I’ve started blogging because I’m a 40 year old married guy who met a teenage girl. If you want more than that you’ll have to go back and read it all. If you’ve made it this far by reading through the entire post you are a trooper indeed. Thanks for indulging me. In case you care, I promise not all my posts will be so interminably long, but this one just took some space to expand and even now I’ve left out major portions of the story. I’m not too worried about it though. I feel fairly certain it will resolve itself in time. Should be an interesting ride.

/g

* In the interest of full disclosure I should admit that, although I refuse to have a myspace page I do have a facebook page. I initially got it to keep tabs on my daughter’s page (which was and is entirely unnecessary but it was the parently thing to do) and facebook *is* marginally better than myspace, right? Besides, I don’t even really use it. My wall is a pathetic baron wilderness. In other words, I didn’t inhale. Yeah, I know.