without you, without youuuuu...

I've always kind of enjoyed the shock on people's faces when I told them that I didn't have the internet at home. People would ask HOW I COULD EVEN LIVE! Even longtime friends who knew that I didn't have the internet would just kind of... forget that I was internet-free at home, and go on and on about this or that show that I could only stream online. And so I would remind them again, and get that "But how do you LIVE??" look.

I lived without the internet for five years by looking at social media feeds on my phone, and by reading a ton of books and watching all of my DVDs. I have honestly never been bored; I can always think of something to do that doesn't involve the internet.

I was also really resistant to Time Warner Cable, which is the only service I could get in Allentown or on the west side. Such crappy service! I refused to pay anything for it, even though people with clipboards would roam the neighborhood and say things like, "One of your neighbors was caught stealing the internet. This means we can give you a deal!" Yeah, no. Even when I moved to North Buffalo, and Time Warner merged with Comcast and became Spectrum, I heard awful things about their service, and I refused to pay for them.

But on the flip side, I was buying a lot of music on Google Play, which I then had to transfer to my aging netbook, so that I could play it at home on iTunes. I bought an external drive that could hold a terabyte's worth of files, but any update or monthly backup would take at least a day. And then I couldn't update basic things on my laptop. Making physical CDs of my music was out of the question, because tracks would just go missing. I put up with this for a while, until I realized that I was spending quite a lot of leisure time at my mom's making sure that things were downloaded and backed up on a system that was doomed to perish. I kept saying that when I got a new laptop, I'd finally get the internet at home.

I bought a new laptop in February (and laptops now have a friggin' terabyte of storage!), but signing up for the internet kept slipping my mind. I was too busy moving all of the pictures from my old laptop onto "the cloud," and trying to learn Windows 10.

Still, my mom got all up into the Roku, and I confess that I got addicted too. I watched all of "It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia" within 3 months. And there were so many other movies and shows that I didn't have time for during weekends at my mom's.

And lo and behold, I discovered that my neighborhood can get Verizon! And yeah, I don't know how installation works, so I got a little freaked out about it (and the box of supplies that Verizon sent me kept referring to self-installation). And yeah, the Verizon tech showed up at 8:30 in the morning on the day I picked, when I was still in bed, because it never occurred to me that I'd be first on the list of installations for the day. But whatever. Now I have internet. For the first time in five years.

I'm very excited to get to a lot of things. But the very first thing I streamed was


Yeah. The internet. It's rad.

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