snitty the mirror through the camera's eye  a Civilization gone with the wind About the author: Christy works for a medical manufacturer sales engineering company. She's not a sales person or an engineer. She's an accountant. She's 35. She drives a PT Cruiser and runs a related website. She collects and wears vintage eyewear. She likes Saint Andre brie. Cats. Shoes. MAC. Hot Donuts NOW. She's allergic to pineapple and cooked fish. Yes: cooked fish. She tires quickly of writing in third person. Where is my mind? My experiences: the beginnings of stretched lobes. they don't cash ethics at the bank.

2010/01/12 09:08 In 1992, I first experienced the internet. I was immediately addicted; for the first time in my life I found people with the same interests and feelings I seemed to have. We'd have discussions on bulletin boards or Usenet or IRC for hours and hours and I'd realize the sun was coming up and I'd completely missed dinner. People were pretty sensitive to their real names and identities being "out there" and many people had alternate identities as they seemed more aware of anything they'd put out on the internet could somehow be found and discovered even though, at the time, it'd have been damn near impossible to do so. For years, people called me ISP or Princess or Snitty or some combo there-of. I've just realized I've been using the internet for 18 years, more than half my life. Almost every friendship I have is from someone I met online and my best friends are people who have never lived within an 8 hour drive of me. The internet is even responsible for reconnecting an old roommate of mine together with me again. They stumbled into "me" online sometime around 1996 after not having seen or spoken to me in 3 years as I'd left Boston to return to Virginia and they'd finished college and were living in Florida. Funny, they knew I spelled my cat's name "Sablekitti" instead of "sablekitty" so the email address I'd used as a return was intentionally a way to keep from getting unwanted emails from people who wouldn't know the difference. It kept a barrier between internet people and me. Knowing the difference, the email was sent and received and the internet connected a former roommate to me again and we've been together ever since. Jesus. I've been married almost 10 years? Anyway, I digress. People today seem to share every possible aspect of their lives online. My 20 year old niece has grown up on the internet and she's been documenting her illegal behavior since she was 16 on sites like MySpace and Facebook. No regard what-so-ever for how having her full name and personal information along with photos of her playing Edward 40 Hands could come back to haunt her in her future. I mean, I sure did laugh my ass off when I saw a group of high school students in a sketchy hotel room with 40oz beer bottles duct taped to every visible hand. I had to wonder: how was my generation of teen internet users so conscious of what we put out there about ourselves when everything was still comparatively "hidden" to most of the world and today, when there are means to find out everything about someone's online identity completely with names, dates, and who they were with, when news stories abound of how employers and colleges are using these details to filter applicants, people continue to post every minute detail of their lives online? I mean, it's one thing to post photos on a semi-closed communities like IAM where there's a policy about sharing photos and such but in famewhore communities like Facebook or the downward spiraling MySpace you're taking a pretty big risk. Or not, I suppose, if you don't see it as a risk. Those Edward 40 Hand photos? My niece's former boyfriend is in them. Having been 21 and securing alcohol for underaged kids as well as getting the hotel room, his army recruiter found them and he lost his ticket to the military. No, I'm really not going to get into how our military is rejecting candidates at a time when we're in war except to say "Abu Ghraib" and how I can understand the Army looking for people who aren't batshit thrilled to document their drinking escapades and knowingly illegal activity. The point is: shit can come back to you. Think about what you're doing now and how it can affect you later. And now I see my sister has allowed my younger niece, age 13, to have a Facebook page which is completely public and the "MySpace" photos have begun: peace signs, duck lips, deep side parts with hair dragged across the face and enough makeup to cover up her skin tone but not conceal the adolescent acne landscape beneath. I'm coming off sanctimoniously, I know. It's not that I was a puritanical vanilla teenager. Hell, when I was 15 I was dating a 22 year old guy & didn't need the high school party scene. Instead of shitty beer or Mad Dog 20/20, I was going to jazz clubs, drinking vodka tonics, smoking pot, and talking music theory with professors. I just wasn't short sighted enough to document it for the world. Maybe what I'm really getting out of this stream of conscious writing is that I'm old.

2010/01/07 13:01 Christmas was a fucking nightmare and next year, I'm reclaiming it as my own. No one is invited here and fuck all if I'm going anywhere else. For the first time in 13 years, Christmas will be quiet, calm and mine. There's some rumblings about a family vacation in January "instead" but I'm thinking "no, thanks." This notion of needing or wanting to spend time with people because you share DNA is a notion I reject. At one point during the week of Christmas I actually looked at everyone in my kitchen and said "who ARE you people?" They all looked familiar but the personalities they were exhibiting were fucking obnoxious and whiny. They bitched about everything all week and I'd just had enough. Next year, they can bitch about their own cooking, their own home temperature, their own sleeping accommodations, their own movie choices and their own activities. I won't spend my money, time, or effort trying to make anyone comfortable in my home other than me and my husband.

2009/11/16 10:18 Ah, Facebook, how you provide entertainment. You're like my 2am internet bootie call; you call me all the time but I'm just so darned busy and I can't be bothered to so much as say "hi" unless I have ulterior motives. It's your fault, really. But I have to thank you because you have really cracked me up. I got an email alert telling me I'd gotten a message from someone named Tracey. She's "looking for family and wondered if I was Randy's daughter." No, hon. There are just a million fucking people that went to my high school named Christy who married into the last name I have now and look JUST LIKE ME. At least she didn't say "do you remember me? I'm your cousin." See, Tracey was perfection. All A student. First chair in band. She had a perfect wedding. Perfect marriage. Everything the girl touched was golden and growing up in that shadow was fucking miserable. Of course I remember her; she was the favorite grandchild. Of course, in the passed several years, her perfect marriage fell apart but it's ok! She married a preacher's son next and they started having a perfect family- a boy and a girl. They even took in a family in need to their home to help them get back on their feet! Awwww. Perfection still. So I probably shouldn't respond with "Why yes, I am Randy's daughter. Are you Tracey, the one who married a preacher's son, told everyone you had taken a poor family in when in reality you were swingers and spouse swapping and making all the children call everyone 'mom' and 'dad'?" I'd then go on to act like I couldn't associate with her because I found her lifestyle horrific or something..... The reality is, I don't give a flying fuck but when you go from being Oprah to Springer, I can't help but laugh.

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