English Audio Request

My move to diverse media consumption was sparked by my first venture into a chat room at the tender age of thirteen. I had been poking around in forums, but they were too redundant for my tastes. I had overcome the frights of Y2K meltdown (I must have asked my mother fifty times a day if she were sure my “baby” was going to make it) and had begun to investigate e-mail. I didn’t know anyone with an e-mail address, let alone anyone that would be worth communicating with. In chat rooms, my identity was malleable from PM window to PM window. Not only could I delight in my own imaginary world, I was actually convincing another person, an older person, that my a/s/l was factual. I remember pretending to be seventeen and from France, thinking I was really pulling the wool, until I typed “wee wee”.
It made me feel powerful, exacerbating my grandiose feelings of skill and ability, until my mother found out what I was doing. She told me it was wrong, pretending to be someone I wasn’t, and forbade me to talk in any chat rooms. I’d better not disobey her, because she would be checking the browsing history. Completely unfazed, I gleefully deleted the cookies, temporary files, and any other record that I had been misbehaving. I was stupid to think my mother was clueless; nonetheless I made sure I visited a bunch of other pages to cover the hours I’d been holed up. I was leading a life where the truth could bend and a lie could win. I was completely obsessed and entirely naïve to the perils of pretending.