In the Days Before Internet

We liked books in the olden days

I work in tech support so I hear all day long how awful it is to be without internet. I know that we live in a world now that we are so dependent on the internet that when it goes down, it's a crisis.

Personally, I love the internet but I'm old enough to remember a time without it. I was born in the late 70's and didn't get online until I was in college. A friend on Facebook posted a link today - 20 Questions I Have For People Who Were In Their 20s Before Cell Phones & Internet. I thought I'd try to answer the questions as I remember to the olden days of the 1980's.

1. How did you make plans? My non-internet days were mostly high school and college. So you'd make plans either at school or via the phone. Not hard but could be more time consuming than now when trying to have to work with your friends' parents' schedules too.

2. How did you CANCEL plans? Again - there was a wonderful thing called a phone. And answering machines!

3. How did you know who was calling you before you picked up the phone? You didn't. It was phone roulette. It could be your mom or a bill collector, and you wouldn't know. Now by the time I got into college in the 90's there was caller ID. Growing up in the 80's though, you just answered the phone. Didn't think about who might be on the other end.

4. How did you rid of the fear that is calling people? Personally - I didn't. I don't like the phone and I don't like calling people. I made the minimum amount of calls a person could make growing up and was extremely happy when texting and email became a thing you could use.

5. How did you find out information about people before you went on dates with them? You asked their friends. Most of the people I dated in my life (which isn't a lot), I met either through friends or through clubs / activities.

6. How did you find people to date in the first place??? Like I said above - you'd meet people through friends, through clubs, through classes.

I met my first boyfriend through a sci-fi club my college best friend and I tried to start. Other people I dated were from my group of friends. And Todd was my college best friend's husband's childhood best friend. I didn't need the internet to find dates and I didn't date that much.

7. How did you keep tabs on exes? You didn't - which isn't a bad thing!

8. How did you keep tabs on what your entire graduating class from high school was doing? Again, you didn't. I got Facebook after I got out of college and it was a trip to see what everyone from high school was doing.

9. How did you look for jobs? Paper want ads, signs in business windows, bulletin boards, word of mouth. I didn't use the internet to find a job until I was out of college.

10. How did your parents get in touch with you when you were out? You didn't unless you needed to. There was pay phones all over back then. I didn't really do much beyond go to friends' houses or the movies, so it was not a concern. My parents knew where I was.

11. How did your survive waiting for meetings, appointments, trains, or anything without being able to pass time by pretending to look busy on your phone? Personally I daydreamed. I'm a writer so even as a kid, so I had no issue entertaining myself quietly when need be.

12. How did you do ANYTHING at work before email? Now, I didn't have a job before internet. Even my first fast food jobs had connections to be able to ring things up. But I'm guessing it was very long and tedious to do office work.

13. How did you tell co-workers (or someone else you were meeting) that you were going to be late when you were stuck in traffic or stuck on some disabled subway car? You didn't. You'd explain when you got there. If the person you were meeting wasn't there, you'd just call them once you go home. Honestly majority of the time, this was a non-issue.

14. How did you sign up for classes at the gym? I never used a gym until I got to college. The classes I signed up for were actual college classes. I took fencing, which was a blast. But I'm assuming that you'd go to the gym or call.

15. How did you know where you were or where you were going ever? This is something I struggled with because I'm not great at reading maps. Until the internet came about and mapquest, I didn't really venture out of my comfort zone.

16. What did you have to do if you broke down on the side of the road? I never broke down on the side of the road or was with my parents when they did. But if you did, you'd walk until you got to someplace with a phone.

17. How did you always have change on you to use these pay phones? When I was younger and had my first job, all I had was cash. And with cash comes change. It's just something that people always had in their wallets.

18. How did you research anything for school? There is wonderful thing that is called the Library. When I was in high school, that's what we used. In college when the internet was used, most teachers would not allow internet sources for papers because the internet was too new. So still off to the library so research the old fashioned way.

19. How did you find out about the weather? You'd watch the evening news. Every night, my parents would watch the news and about halfway through they would show the weather forecast. You could also look outside for current weather.

20. How did you stay in touch with friends? All my friends were through school so it wasn't hard through the school year. Otherwise there was still this wonderful invention called the telephone.

I do understand how strange it must be to think about no internet but we weren't completely in the dark ages. The author of the article seems to forget that even though we didn't have smart phones or cell phones, we did have phones. We had access to knowledge via the library and the television. We had books and games to amuse ourselves.

Now I do love the internet. I'm obviously using the internet right now to write this - I'm also working from home via the internet. It's made life better in a lot of ways but we did live and happily so without being tethered to the internet.

Imperfect Bodies

Me at the end of high school

Last week, a wonderful author friend of mine posted a really moving post about her history of body issues. It made me think a lot about my own issues with my own imperfect body.

My mom was a beautiful woman. She wasn't very tall but she was naturally skinny with a beautiful face. She was as close to the ideal that I've seen without plastic surgery. This made me feel like my body was about as far from the ideal as I could get from a young age.

I did not inherit my mom's skinny genes. My body type comes from my dad, so I'm short and squat. I have hips and I have boobs. But I also have a tendency to be overweight. Add in that I've always preferred reading and watching TV over any kind of exercise, I've been considered overweight since I was a teenager.

Looking back at pictures now, I wasn't really overweight. My body is shaped to carry more weight around my middle because of the hips that I've got. Even now when I'm actually overweight, I'm still carrying all the extra weight in my middle.

But my body issues really started before I even hit puberty. You see, I'm extremely short. My parents were concerned about how short I was when I was a kid. They even, briefly, looked into having me stretched because my doctor thought I would be under five feet. The 80's were a strange time.

In the end, I did reach five feet but barely. I've met women who were shorter but not very many. I'm a hobbit, short and round. And I was bullied because I was short and round for many years.

In elementary school, I was teased for being short. In middle school, I was verbally and physically abused by this girl who was twice as big as I was. I think the reason she bullied me was because I was so much smaller than she was.

In high school, I was still bullied for my size but now it was also because I was hugely geeky and didn't hide it at all. I wasn't bullied as much as I was in middle school, but I do remember vividly an incident where I was surrounded by a bunch of guys. One of them forced me to kiss him - he and his friends thought this was so funny.

I was so embarrassed at the time. And I felt like I had done something wrong to warrant such behavior. Looking back on it now, I know that I had been assaulted. I hate even now to call it a sexual assault but it kind of was. This guy forced himself on me even though it was only a kiss.

I never told my mom about that incident. I just wanted to forget it and move on. My mom stood up

Me now

for me - she causing a ruckus with the principal was how the bullying, at least the physical stuff, stopped in middle school. But she also is one of the main reasons why I have a poor view of my body.

Mom was well meaning but she was always on me to lose weight. She'd tell me that boys would like me more if I lost weight among other things. I'm honestly a bit lazy so I didn't do much about it. I still would have rather read than exercise. My sister, who is got my dad's genes too, went overboard - she was anorexic for a while when she was in high school. She was obsessed with being skinny like our mom.

Going to college helped me with my body issues. I was on my own for the first time, and I realized that I was pretty. Still not hot or overly attractive, but pretty. I started dating and my first boyfriend was head over heels for me. Unfortunately he was also extremely tall which made things very awkward since I'm so short.

I was in the best shape of my life in college because I walked everywhere. But I still had a thick middle and my mom still got on me to lose weight. Even though I was not the ideal, I dated some in college.

After college and after my mom passed, I got rounder. Going from walking everywhere to sitting at a desk all day made me put on a lot of weight. The grief of losing my mom plus the chronic pain issues that started soon after, and I was round.

Even though my body is not ideal, I still managed to attract my wonderful husband. Even though my body fails me in lots of ways with my chronic pain, it also helped me grow and nourish Emily.

Todd and I were talking about it a while ago and we both realize that neither of us will ever be skinny. He's very solid and even though he's lost a lot of weight, he's still a big guy. Even if I lose the 50 pounds I'd like to for health reasons, I'll still have a thick middle. That's just how we were made.

I hope to teach Emily to love her imperfect body the way it is. No-one is perfect so we need to stop trying to achieve an ideal that isn't possible.

#YesAllWomen and My Assault

Over the weekend, my twitter has been filled with the #YesAllWomen hashtag. I read about the awful things that happened to other women and the precautions others took in order to keep themselves safe. It gave me a lot to think about, as a women and the mother of a daughter.

It was reading Twitter the other night that made me remember that I was assaulted in high school. All because I was a quiet, geeky girl.

Assault seems like a harsh word for what happened, but that's really what it was. I was in the hallway between classes and there was a whole group of guys harassing me. One actually grabbed me and forced me to kiss him. I got away after that, but I was shaken and embarrassed.

I had a lot of issues with being bullied, but I just tried to ignore the taunts. I had been physically bullied by a girl, but my parents ended up going to the principal. The physical bullying stopped but the emotional bullying went on until I graduated from high school.

I don't remember if I told my parents about the assault. I do remember being very, very embarrassed about it. Technically it was also my first kiss - what should have been a wonderful moment was taken away from me in an act of violence. All because I was a girl.

It has been years since I thought about it but it makes me angry thinking about it as an adult. I never did anything to anyone who bullied me but I was targeted because I was quiet, shy and a girl. I'm sure quiet, shy boys get bullied too, but in most cases an assault like this wouldn't have taken place.

I'm sure the guy who assaulted me didn't think he did anything wrong and that's a huge part of the problem. There are a ton of great guys out there, I know I married one. But while there is one guy out there who thinks of women as lesser, as property, as someone not a person but someone who should do as they want her to do, then we women will still have that fear in the back of our minds.

Me and Football!

Image: https://www.facebook.com/NFL

It’s Super Bowl Sunday! In honor of the big game today, here is the story of how I became and stayed a football fan.

When I was in high school, I was part of the marching band. This required me to be at every home football game. A lot of the other kids would just talk and ignore the game, but I decided that if I had to be there every Friday I should know the basics.

My parents always watched the Lions on Sunday. Though my dad did more watching and my mom would often nap on the couch. But they were both more than happy to explain how football works. I started watching the Lions with them nearly every Sunday.

I continued to watch football in college though not as regularly. I would often go to the home games for my college, Central Michigan, in part because it was a cheap way to spend a Saturday afternoon.

After college, I started dating Todd. He loves football so once we moved in together Sundays were football days during the season. When we first started dating, he watched more college football but he always preferred the NFL.

When we bought our house, he was excited to get DirectTV for the NFL Sunday ticket. That he could watch any game he wanted, including our team the Lions. Emily knows that on Sundays in football season, Daddy gets the TV in the living room. She’ll play in the living room while football is on. She picks teams to root for by the color of their uniforms, but she knows how to put her arms in the air when a team gets a touchdown.

Emily is excited to watch some of the big game tonight with her mommy and daddy. I’m not sure which team she’ll be rooting for but I’ll try to live tweet her responses to the game on Twitter. Todd doesn’t really care which team wins either but I’ll be rooting for the Seahawks because they are my friend Judy’s team.

I hope everyone has a great Sunday – with football or without!