This is my sitting on the rocking chair like a grandma on the porch moment…when I suddenly turn to the young people and say: Back in my day…
When I logged on to the internet in 1998 with a 56k modem dial-up was all the rage! It sounded something like this …. boop boop beep beep boop…(dialing up)….brrrrrbeeeeeeeeeepboop boop beeeeep beeeep brreeeeeeeep skiddlybeepbeepbeep breeeeeep…for at least a good 2-3 minutes on a fast day. America Online. WOO! The amazing wonder years of my teenage life.
But let's back it up a little further. My media diet as kid was pretty much family-friendly because my curfew for bed was primetime. Prime time is the time when kids should go to sleep and parents can now watch more adult shows.
I used to watch TV uninterrupted for no more than a half hour at a time. It'd be like one episode of Sesame Street and Reading Rainbow back to back.
Later on as a big kid, I'd wake up early on Saturday mornings to go bonkers over a bowl of cereal while watching the best cartoons ever: Smurfs, GI Joe, The Ewoks, Duck Tales, Thundercats, Spacehawks, Bravestar, He-Man and She-Ra, Woody Woodpecker… Cartoons almost always had a moral to the story.
Needless to say, I sometimes stayed up with mom & dad for prime time to watch shows like: Knightrider, V, Airwolf, The A-team, and MacGuyver. Even then, in these shows the punchlines were funny, not perverted, and there was justice for victims, the bad guys never got away — but nobody slaughtered them either. Sure, the bad guys got blown up, but then you'd see them knocked out with a little soot on their face, not charred, blasted or bloodied into hamburger bits. Before there was Law & Order, there was LA Law!
I grew up with little crushes on guys like Murdock from A-team, MacGyver and Marty Stouffer from Wild America. MacGyver was brilliant and he'd use like a paperclip, a wad of chewed up gum and a shirt button to escape from a prison cell. "A paperclip can be a wonderous thing. More times than I can remember, one of these has gotten me out of a tight spot," he'd say between his adventures.
So where did all this sudden reminiscing come from this morning? Well, I Skyped for the first time yesterday. Marked my calendar for this event, March 23, 2012. No, I really didn't mark my calendar, but it was my first time.
I felt a little bit like my childhood buddy ET. It was hard to articulate and it was completely foreign to me.
Let me say this, when I was dialing up for internet connection and hitting up the chatrooms the norm was: a/s/l?
It wasn't too long after that when webcams became all the rage, and if someone chatted with you for a short time and asked: do you have a webcam?
Well! That was a bit …how shall we say…DIRTY! Yeah, you definitely did not want to be a teenage girl with a webcam.
Today, that's the norm. It goes like this: "Hey how are you? Want to Skype? I don't really like typing all that much."
I've realized, if I get offended or shy away from video chatting it's suddenly abnormal.
So imagine for a minute, that I'm not tech-savvy. I'm not a neanderthal really, but if you called me a barbarian, I'd be cool with it. (Afterall, barbarians were also all the rage when I was growing up. F'reals, just ask Conan the Barbarian, He-Man and my all time fave, She-Ra: Princess of Power!)
I'm here to confess that I've hesitated keeping up to date with all that media and technology has made so convenient as far as communication goes. I also confess that I love text messaging but I got my first cell phone at age 25 and didn't start texting until age 27. At age 31, I still don't own a smartphone.
I confess that I haven't watched TV regularly or at all in about 3 years and it's not the first stretch of time that I don't watch TV for a span. (Back in 2001 through 2003 or 2004 I also did not watch TV because it wasn't affordable on my budget living away from home.) I don't need TV.
How long have I lived away from home? I left the nest at age 18. Full-fledged independence. That means learning real quick the difference between need and want.
But by the same token, I've stayed pretty much plugged into the world wide web since the dial-up days and maybe I have had MMORPG subscriptions for years at a time — I'm not going to confess that right away.
How does all this pertain to becoming a missionary?
Well, for starters I won't feel so unplugged or go through withdrawals as we trekk through third world countries. I won't miss TV or wonder what shows I'm missing. I might be daydreaming about Marty Stouffer and pretending I'm on my very own episode of Wild America…but in my case Wild Africa.
You will not likely see me spaced out to my own soundtrack with earbuds permanently attached to my head and an MP3 player. I will likely not want to partake of any movie watching or home-away-from-home media luxuries.
I seriously pray to God that I'll fall back in love with simple living. I pray to God that my team mates won't ostracize me for being unrelatable at times because I'm unable to quote movie lines, catch references to popular TV celebrities or not know the intimate details of Twilight or the Hunger Games.
Sometimes I feel like an alien. But where I come from that's kinda cool, and a bag of Reese's Pieces will make everything alright.
Now, however, I'm ready to Skype! It's a blessing to know that when I'm far, far away, this ET will be able to phone home.
