The interwebs

I was just looking up some Kahlil Gibran. It's been yeeears since I've accessed that side of my interests. Wow...

I remember when I discovered Kahlil Gibran -- it came along with the great big internet: I had just moved to the States at 18, AOL was the online weapon of choice at the time, for non-techies, and it seemed the American masses were just starting to use the internet for personal/casual use. It was thrust upon me all at that same time: initially as part of the job, quickly becoming part of my personal life.

Having grown up in Brasil, where English-language libraries are scarce, my exposure to English literature was pretty limited... I guess I could've gone after good literature in Portuguese, but it just wasn't around. What did happen to come around, I devoured, even if it was in old Portuguese (think: the equivalent of KJV-Bible-English in Portuguese) and even if the choices were extremely limited (read: Hans Christian Anderson, For Whom the Bell Tolls, Les Miserables, and so on).

At the same time that I was discovering on-line-ness, I also found me a great online friend (we've been friends for years, aww) who educated me in the ways of this web-world and kept me current informationally, even if I was just an average user.

Anyway... all that to say... what the internet first meant to me was...

Vast libraries available at the behest of a few keystrokes!!!

I was thrilled! Worlds opened! Universes discovered! It was lovely, in its own innocent way.

Being online is an entirely different deal/experience, these days. People can't function without it and hardly any aspect of life avoids its influence (?).

Yet, as I sit here browsing Kahlil Gibran, I'm having a small flashback* of when all the internet was, to me, was one massive library, inducing great happy-ness in me.

--And a way to contact an un-met friend halfway across the world.

We were young.

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*(Flashbacks for me happen this way: I remember how I felt at that given moment -- if something makes me feel a distinct way, in life, there's a good chance it'll show up in my thoughts/feelings later in life; photos remind me of how I felt at that given moment, which reminds me of the event the photo is associated with; memories are confusing and complicated things.)