The Internet has been around all my life, but I didn't have access to it for the longest time. When I was a kid, my family had dial-up. You may or may not know what I'm talking about, since it's such a horrifying concept. "Dial-up" is a system that slowly connects you to the Internet, and once you're slowly connected to your very slow Internet, you can't use your phone. I think my grandparents still have it, but that is acceptable; they hardly ever use their computer.
Anyway, that is what I had access to when I was young, but even then, I wasn't really aware of it. My first contact with the Internet was in fourth grade, when I made my first email address. I accessed my inbox through Outlook Express, so I wasn't even in contact with an Internet browser.
When I was a kid, I was only allowed to watch PBS, and even then, it was for two hours a day at the most. My parents encouraged me to spend my time reading. While they spent a lot of time monitoring what I watched on television, they let me read almost anything. On the upside, I did really well on all my standardized reading and writing tests, and it increased my vocabulary and my understanding of grammar. On the downside, that meant I did not spend a lot of time interacting with my peers. During recess, they would trade Pokemon cards (a reference to a show I didn't watch), play on the monkey bars (an activity I lacked the upper-body strength for), play four-square or tether-ball (games I didn't understand/considered dangerous, which also had huge lines), jumped rope (something I could never quite figure out) or engage in those nonsensical hand games (an activity my misplaced elitism considered stupid. Actually, I still consider them stupid, misplaced elitism aside).
I had a few friends, but until the fourth or fifth grade, I rarely saw them outside of school.
I had a few friends, but until the fourth or fifth grade, I rarely saw them outside of school.
But what of the neighborhood children that youngsters such as myself would have been interacting with? Well, to put it bluntly, I didn't have that kind of neighborhood. My parents and I are pretty sure that there were drug dealers across the street at one point, I wasn't allowed to leave the cul-de-sac unless I was with one of my parents, and all of the kids in the cul-de-sac were either much older or much younger than me.
(Okay, that sounds really bad. I didn't live in the "dangerous part of town" or anything. The alleged drug dealers were fairly unobtrusive, they just acted suspiciously. Otherwise, my neighborhood was pretty peaceful).
Also, it rains here all the time. Kids don't play outside.
There was a prompt here.
In addition to all the time I spent reading, my parents read to me all the time. My dad likes Charles Dickens, so he read me Great Expectations, Nicholas Nickleby, Our Mutual Friend, A Christmas Carol and a lot of other Dickens' novels. My mom read the first Harry Potter book to me when they were first coming out. Literacy is really important to my parents, and it's important to me, too.
I also had a doll house. It came with a family of plastic dolls. There was a blonde mother, and a brunet father, along with their two blonde daughters (and possibly a son, I can't remember) and their brunet male and female babies. As I mentioned before, they were made entirely of plastic, except for the mother, who had a flimsy cloth skirt. This didn't last long. She became a housewife in a teal leotard. They did not have names.
I also had Playmobil dolls that my aunt gave me for Christmas one year. My favorite was a doll I had dubbed Clara. She was a red-head, I'm fairly sure. I remember liking her because she appeared to be the oldest, and she had this really awesome clip-on bonnet. She also wore this really pretty blue dress (as pretty as a compilation of hollow plastic cubes can be). She had a brunette sister whose name I can't remember. They weren't packaged together or anything. All of the dolls in the doll house were siblings except for the parents.
Anyway, Clara's brunette tomboy-ish sister was a farmer. This could potentially be boring, but it wasn't, because she came with a scythe/sickle. Thus, she could use it as it was intended to be used: as a weapon.
Their brother was Robin Hood. I didn't actually refer to him as Robin Hood, but he looked the part. He also had a clip-on hat.
They had two younger siblings. One of which was a little girl named...Marina, I think, who for some reason had a baby. This disturbed me, so I ignored it. Marina lost all of her hair - and with it most of her skull - in the hands of my brother. I disliked the unfinished lobotomy project she had become, so after that, I ignored her along with her baby.
There was also a Barbie and a Kelly doll. The Kelly doll was fun because I could pop her head off all the time, and then just pop it back on. If I weren't so naive during my childhood, I would have labelled the Barbie as the promiscuous aunt in my doll family.
Those are just the humans, though. In the cast of my doll house, the main players were the cats.
I was obsessed with cats when I was younger. Because of this, I had upwards of twenty cat figurines. I made use of all of them. They would protect the house from an unknown yet ominous, enemy; and would fight the humans for dominance of the estate (I was biased towards the cats. They always won).
Sometimes, when I got bored of playing in the doll house (or the vet's office, or the stable, which I also had), the dolls would move to their submarine/cargo ship/fortress. My brother had a Duplo set which I would play with all the time. With it, I would make a...less traditional...homes for my doll family. Often, the change of living arrangements would be because of their status' as fugitives. Because of this, I would be sure to include lots of hidden compartments.
Remembering all this, I now understand where half of my story ideas come from, and why I insist on my characters having huge, convoluted, dysfunctional family trees.
While I am notorious for starting things and not finishing them, I did complete at least...two, I think...latch-hook projects.
Then, I discovered the Internet.
