Let me preface this with the disclaimer that I am at the moment all PMSy and weepy, so if I sound like I'm whining I probably am.
My brother has what would classically be called a 'social life.' Most of the time, he isn't even home because he's at some friend's house, and when he is home he's always on IM or bringing one of his friends along with him. From what I hear he's quite popular at school, especially with the girls, and I'm constantly fielding phone calls from his buddies when he's off at someone else's house and about ready to shoot his damn cell phone because it keeps ringing. My parents tolerate this cheerfully, and would never dream of grounding him--indeed, they commiserate with him when he rants about how evil his friends' parents are for grounding them for this or that.
What they don't seem to realize is that I have a social life as well. I haven't had anyone over to my house in the past three years except for two or three school projects, and haven't gone over to anyone else's house except when they drag me to parties. I don't hang out in front of the movie theater, I don't go skateboarding with the rest of some gang like my brother does; I am, so far as they can tell, a complete recluse who spends all her waking life on the computer.
The connection they seem to be missing is that my social life is the computer. With few exceptions, all my friends, all the people I chatter to and gossip with and keep up on the daily lives of, are people I've never met face-to-face. Many of them I've never even communicated with in realtime, just through LJ or message boards. But you guys are still my friends, and you're literally the only friends I have. I'm perfectly happy with this arrangement... until my parents get mad at me. Whenever they get mad at me, they threaten to disconnect my internet, often out of sheer spite--as in, whatever I'm doing "wrong" tends to be petty and have nothing to do with the computer whatsoever. I understand perfectly if they take it away because it distracts me from my homework, but it's not even that--tonight, for example, my dad said that every time he has to tell me to straighten up my place at the table he'll disconnect my internet for an hour.
It probably seems perfectly reasonable to them, of course. Make her listen to us. Threaten to take away the thing she appears to love the most. Teach her a goddamn lesson. But never, in all their screaming matches with my brother, have they threatened to ground him or separate him from his friends, who are basically his umbilical cord as much as the internet is mine. They say it's not right, it's not an appropriate punishment, bla bla. But they don't seem to realize that every time they pull the plug they are grounding me, because this is my social life and I find it well-nigh impossible to make friends IRL.
What annoys me is the total irrelevance of the things they'll disconnect me for. "No internet until your homework's done" is fine, it's the net-addict equivalent of "No, you can't go over to Charlie's until your homework's done." But I'll be arguing with my mom over something completely unrelated, like whether it's my turn to do the laundry, and all of a sudden she'll break in with "Well, do you like your internet, missy? Because if you do, you'd better get your ass upstairs and do your laundry." Gee, thanks mom. How nice of you to be rational.
They say the Internet is a privilege, not a right. Is having friends a privilege?
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