Todd's parents still think he's a tee-totaling, straight-laced virgin. And if they're reading this, he still is!
I finally joined the twentieth century this week when I hooked up my first modem and became the next to last person alive to look for naked pictures on - I mean SURF - the Internet.
My mom bought me the modem as a Valentine's Day present. My girlfriend, who lives 1,100 miles away and is getting sick of $200 a month phone bills, offered to pay the $19 a month to hook me up to an Internet provider so we could talk via computer.
This Internet thing's not bad, I must say, particularly when you don't have to invest anything to get started on it. And though it took a while, my plan to get other people to pay for me to hook up worked perfectly.
Or so I thought.
Against the wishes of my family, I moved to Florida from Missouri nine months ago. My mom, who thinks she knows me just because she birthed me, fed me and clothed me for 18 years before packing me off to college, was convinced that I wouldn't write her letters. No matter how much I protested, she would just sniff, dab a tear from her eye and sigh that she would wait to hear from me.
That was step one.
By the way, I'm still planning to write her one of these days.
Mom recently bought a computer that came with a modem in it and quickly discovered the ease and wonder of email.
Step two.
Sure, I like to think of myself as a hip and with-it cat. I'm embarrassed that my parents hit the net before I did, but that was critical for my plan to work. Because as anyone with parents knows, if your mom and dad figure out another way to keep tabs on you, they're going to use it. In that respect, parents are a lot like the Pentagon. They have eyes and ears everywhere, and they're always looking for another communications satellite.
And email, in this case, was the perfect answer. It's quick, dependable and doesn't require the heady effort of buying stamps and walking to the mailbox outside my front door - a terrible inconvenience inherent in the conventional postal system.
Thus Mom bought me the modem.
My mistake came in urging my girlfriend to spend some time - alone and unsupervised! - with my mom to teach her how to use the computer. My girlfriend made one teasing comment about me "visiting bad neighborhoods" on the Internet, and already I'm in trouble.
"Bad neighborhoods?" my mother wailed. "What's this about bad neighborhoods on the Internet?"
Tonya, my girlfriend, either unaware of the trouble she was putting me in or - more likely - just really ornery, replied, "Yeah, you can find pictures of naked people all over the Internet."
My mom really didn't need to know that. My parents are ethical, moral people who hold old-fashioned ideas. In Internet terms, they would be Parents 1.0, while I would be Smart-aleck kid 12.3. Sure, they beat me onto the Internet, but it was only just last year that they bought their first answering machine, taking them up to Mom and Dad 1.0.2.
So I just got my first note from my mother since her afternoon with Tonya. It reads: "I trust you will use your modem constructively in both time and content. It can be a terrible time waster if you're not careful." That's Mother's Talk for "Keep your dirty mind away from the nudie pictures!"
I'm 27 years old, and my mother is worried that I'm going to spend my days hunched over a computer screen with pixillated shots of Gillian Anderson from "The X-Files" naked. In fact, I have this terrible fear of her searching the net for anything naughty her baby might stumble upon and firing email demanding that those web pages be dismantled. I can see it now: within a year my mother will have done for Internet nudity what Marge Simpson did for cartoons when she protested the violence of Itchy and Scratchy in that episode of "The Simpsons."
And everyone else on the world wide web will swamp me with email death threats.
All because computer geeks haven't come up with the one chip we, as an advanced society need: the P-chip. Similar to the V-chip that would forbid television programming to children, the P-chip would keep unmentionable Internet sites away from those who need to see it the least: ie, parents. Just as desperately as I need to see nudie pictures of Gillian Anderson, Maura Tierney and Johnny Depp (email: tfoltz@flanet.com), my parents desperately need to remain blissfully unaware of the existence of said pictures.
Because the only thing worse then my parents worrying about me wasting me time downloading nudie pictures is something that just came to mind: me worrying about them spending hours doing the same thing.
Shudder.
Todd Foltz hasn't figured out that his prize Kate Winslet download is a dreadful fake that even a ten-year-old could spot.