English Audio Request

“Shut up, and sit down”, she said. Forget the nuances of netiquette, Steele belabored the benefits of physical exercise, diagrammed the dynamic of aerobic respiration, and shoved her high school shot-put and pole vaulting career to the pit of my stomach. An hour later I was feeling affronted and abhorrent as I trudged out of her office. I tried to reframe the situation in light of skepticism, someone could be watching, tracking my every click. Paranoid, I painfully regretted the countless hours I’d spent poised thirty centimeters from the screen. Someone could find me, kidnap me and take me to a place with no computers and no chocolate. Leery and lonely, I deserted the Internet and its diversions. I spent significantly less time just surfing, only visiting the sites that were recommended by the librarian for researching project topics.
2005. As a high school junior, I was expected to use applications like MySpace, xanga, and AIM to hobnob, even if only peripherally, with the popular kids. Instead of calling my house phone number to “hang out”, classmates would ask for my “screen name”. Bashfully, I must confess this is the year I started asking friends to chill instead of come over to play. I believed I could be whomever I pleased in these virtual worlds, a reincarnation of my chat room days,. Instead of a slightly rotund, mouse-haired girl with fang teeth braces and a uni-brow, I could create an identity that completes my ideal self. I vowed to prove my intelligence online because I somehow couldn’t manage offline. I assured myself that unlike school, I wouldn’t be ridiculed for wearing Wal-Mart’s bell-bottoms with pink shag fur trim and cow print vest, because people couldn’t see the real me. I constantly brawled with the balance of truth and lies. If my xanga screen name was any indication [atormentedsoul00], I was on the brink of a severe identity crisis.