BACK TO THE FUTURE (Only, like, 26 years later.)

SEPTEMBER 2, 2011

A young girl stands in her room. It is 5:30, and, as will hopefully be the pattern for the rest of the year, she is going to wake up at this exact same time every single day in order to get to jazz band. She hopes that she has actually gotten into jazz band, at least. This, as well as the fact that today they announce the placements for CKYO, is quite exciting. She’ll have to wait until she gets out of school to talk to the CKYO director over the phone, though, because who wants a call at 5:30 AM? Admittedly, this would be much simpler and less time-consuming if she had an email account.

But she doesn’t.

Email doesn’t exist yet, so it’s pretty much a moot point.

As she travels through her many classes, she finds an unpleasant surprise in English. A three-page written assignment is due the next day. Unfortunately, she doesn’t have a computer, as her parents say they aren’t getting one until it is totally and absolutely necessary. But that’s okay, really, because she doesn’t have anything better to do with her time. She has no social-networking sites to talk to acquaintances on, she has no means of putting any of her drawings and sketches into the computer, and she’s got no way to talk to people who are just on the internet and interested in the same graphic novel as her.

So, basically, her life is pretty ordinary.

But to me, this life is quite odd! Social networking sites are a very large part of my life, especially as some of them allow me to talk about art and developments in both real life and fiction. But I would agree that social networking is not exactly necessary, and it would be very easy for me to find other outlets for my creativity.

My relationships with others, should I have lived 20 years earlier, probably wouldn’t change very much. The ones in real life wouldn’t, at least. My online friends would have no way of getting in contact with me, so I wouldn’t know anything about them. Because of this, I’d prefer to live when I am right now, because my interactions with online friends have helped to strengthen my work as an artist and to motivate me into creating more art than I would if I had never met those friends.