My eyes are practically glued onto the 21" Sony Flat Screen monitor all day at work while my fingers are busily scrambling over the keyboard and every now and then, my right hand grabs onto the clear laser mouse. I feel the NEED to log onto the internet to check e-mail or just surf the net every 5-10 minutes. Normally, I refrain myself from doing so just because, well, I've got tons of stuff to get done for the boss or a client.

I come home after a 9-hour day and what's the first thing I do when I get home? I turn on the damn computer! I know I've got other stuff to get done, like do laundry, clean out the closet, wash dishes, cook dinner, watch tv, read a book, finish painting on that canvas I've layered over 3 times already, get some freelance done, but instead, I log onto the internet. It's a habit. It's an addiction. It's a problem.

So, my internet provider (AT&T Roadrunner) has been down for a whole day and now it's finally back on. Lately, it's been going down every couple of days and it's pissing me off. I've been thinking of switching to dsl, but that would mean notifying everyone of a new email address, which would be a huge hassle. I feel helpless without the internet. I freak. It's like oxygen being cut off. Last night, I was so antsy that I remembered I could still access the internet through my AOL account using my telephone line. Despite knowing the fact that pages would load up slower, I HAD to get on and so I did, only I had to pay that extra $2.50/hr. Of course, I ended up being on for a couple of hours so the measly $2.50 added up pretty quickly.

Things must change. I cannot allow myself to let this addiction run my life. The thing is, what the heck is this doing for me other than to kill time? Why must I kill time like this? Sure, I learn some interesting things off the internet and I create connections with strangers, other than that, it's preventing me from doing other things, most importantly getting daily things done. I mean, there are dead flowers that have fallen apart on my coffee table. They've been sitting there looking all sad and miserable for a week now. Mold's starting to grow inside the vase. Ick. And now I'm going to have to clean that slime out. I have nobody to blame but myself.

I do know that the other day, I happened to stroll into a chatroom for computing people. Now, mind you, I normally don't go online to be in chatrooms, but sometimes, I like to go into a room and observe the conversations that are going on. The computing room is an interesting one. I get to learn technical stuff that I don't already know. The last time I was in there, some guy from Chicago was trying to open a word document but he didn't have word. He was on a mac and everyone else in the room was on pc, so since I'm a mac user and I know how frustrating it is to not know how to open a document, I decided to help out. I offered to open the document for him if he'd send it to me. I would convert it into simpletext and send it back to him. Well, what I didn't anticipate was that the document ended up consisting of only photos! You can't convert photos into simpletext. I was determined to get this photo back to him. It was a challenge. But, I finally figured it out. I dragged the image onto my desktop, which converted it into a picture clipping. From there, I opened the picture clipping, copied and pasted it into photoshop. Then, I saved the image into a jpg. Voila! I was so excited. I sent the picture to him and he was quite appreciative. What did it do for me? It made me feel good. It made me feel like I was on top of the world and that I knew my stuff. And, that, that is one of the reasons why I am addicted to the internet.