I’ve been a busy little bee getting my other website together. That’s my “professional" website, and I’m hoping that it will get me lots and lots of jobs that will make me enough money so that I can eat in the manner to which I am accustomed.

It’s kind of funny having these two websites, and having two computers in my apartment, and doing my work over the Internet, and having a husband who is a web designer, and having a life that often seems to revolve around all things technological.

It’s funny because, back in 1995 when I returned from Freiburg the first time so that I could graduate from college in the States, I was dead set against having anything to do with computers. I hadn’t had a computer in Germany (I hadn’t even had television, and I hadn’t missed it), and I didn’t see why I would need one in the States. I had a word processor, and that was enough for me - or so I thought.

But in the two years that I had been in Germany, America had started to go computer crazy. Everybody was talking about Windows and e-mail and the Internet, and I didn’t understand any of it because I had missed out on the boom.

I was quite hostile towards it all, actually. See, I am a pen and paper sort of person. I, like my mother, have a pen and notebook fetish. If you let my mother and I loose in a stationery store, you will not see us again for days.

There’s something wonderfully warm and reassuring about holding a shiny new pen. There’s something exciting about having the pristine pages of a new notebook in front of you. When you have those two things, anything is possible. You never know what your notebook is going to be filled with. You could write poetry. You could write letters to long lost friends. You could write the next War and Peace. You could just doodle.

You can’t doodle on a computer.

I was dubious about the whole writing process on a computer. And I was turned off by the technological fanaticism. I was tired of hearing people talk about e-mail.

And I think most of all, I was just afraid that, if I broke down and let a computer into my life, I wouldn’t be able to get rid of it again. I would be addicted. And that’s exactly what happened.

It was a gradual process, but there was one definite epiphany. I was a novice surfer, bumbling my way around the Web (using a text-only browser, by the way - no pretty pictures for me), and somehow or another I came across the Ceolas Irish music site. Since I had recently become an instrument-playing member of the Irish traditional music world, I was unspeakably thrilled to find such a great resource for music on the Web.

That was when I realized that the Web actually had a lot to offer me, and that my stubbornness had been silly, and that the whole computer thing wasn’t really all bad.

And now I’m hooked. I’m not addicted - but I’m definitely throwing myself headlong into the computer age. There are still some things I won’t do on the computer (like keep a really private journal), but in most other respects I consider myself a computer convert. The computers and the websites are piling up around me. I don’t like to travel without my laptop. I’m always wishing that we had a zip drive and a CD burner.

I need to go check my e-mail.