"Wasted" Time Anonymous

The oblong screen of a piercingly blue iMac G3 glowed in front of me. I was six years old. At first, the new machine was nothing more than a medium for games on Disney’s website. But slowly, as I learned how to copy and paste and click and drag and highlight and backspace, I discovered something far beyond what Disney could ever show me: the instructive power of the internet. Equipped with my new navigational skills and a computer-time allowance most six-year-olds could only dream of, “wasted” time on the internet soon became the centerpiece of my upbringing.

The internet was the only thing that could possibly satisfy my drive to know, my need to explore. One dull summer day in junior high I decided on an impulse to master the striking squiggly-squaglies of the Arabic alphabet. Using Google images and busuu.com, those striking squiggly-squaglies soon turned into letters I could command and grasp. The next step was actually learning the language.I learned the basics of conversational Arabic, but, as it turns out, conversational Arabic was no good without an actual conversation. So I took to the internet once again to have that actual conversation. I got a headset and said a few phrases in my broken Arabic and uploaded the video...