Somewhere a radio is playing; frequency-modulated static over the sleepy drawl of a late-night DJ and the songs of decades long gone.  Nothing stirs in the house, just me and the tap-tap-tap of fingers on keys.

It is a moment outside time in a place adrift from the world.

But tomorrow the streets will be clear and the dance will begin again, leaving only the trickles of snow that linger in shadows and the endless radio haze.

I’ve thought long and hard about my options now that my phone contract is up for renewal, and the more I consider, the less sure I am – not just of what I want, but of my innate gadget-fetishism as a whole.

My first choice was going to be a Galaxy Tab, but having seen the prices, I’m not sure if it remains a sensible idea. For that money I could have an iPad – I’m typing this post from one and it sure is nice to type on, but everything else Appley would get on my nerves soon enough. Should I just go for an upgrade of my current hardware – the latest and greatest Android phone, rather than trying to split my usage into a separate tablet and dumbphone? Maybe just jack the whole business in and keep internet browsing to my laptop?

My previous post, in which I spent too much of everyone’s time reminiscing about my horrific late-90s website, reminded me of simpler days. Windows 98, Yahoo dialup, AOL Instant Messenger, Netscape Navigator. A big beige box with 32MB of RAM and 1 hour-a-day usage limit imposed by my parents.

Pretty grim by today’s standards. But yet I used AIM to talk to my friends every night, even though I’d seen them at school that day. And now we have Twitter and Facebook and all the rest, and I’ve IMed my own Best Man, someone I lived with for two years, maybe once a year – and most of my other friends less than that.

I looked at only a few websites a day, in part because they took so long to load, but I was pretty happy with that. These were days a long time before RSS and clearing hundreds of items a day through Google Reader.

For all the grey clicky buttons and emoticons and sneaky IRC sessions behind my parents’ backs, was it maybe just more fun when that’s what the Internet was like? Should I save my money for something other than gadgetry, and hark back to some more innocent age? Or have I got my rose-tinted mirror shades set to maximum, yearning to revive a fake past that I would get bored of within days, separated as I would be from the lightning-fast pulse of technology?

At the time, I suppose the main character’s relentlessly chirpy attitude had quite an effect on me. I watched a lot of similar stuff around that time, and somehow the idea that being somewhat self-sacrificing and being constantly happy at people would Make Everything Okay got stuck in my head.

Actually it seemed to work pretty well when I was that age, but that attitude probably got stuck for rather too long — case in point, here’s me still spaffing Cardcaptor Sakura song lyrics on my LiveJournal at age 19. Of course, approaching life with the attitude of a fictional, supernaturally-chirpy 10-year-old girl didn’t really survive first contact with University life, and certainly not with fatherhood.

But watching the series again still makes me happy, both to see the characters fall in love again, and to remind myself how glad I am that I am no longer that naive.

And kind of confused that, despite the first time I watched Cardcaptor Sakura seeming so recent, it was nearly half my lifetime ago.

And come June, the inevitable happened, and off we all went.

There’s a lot I don’t miss about that time — the pressure of coursework and exams, the phone calls every night until my head felt ready to burst, the having very little money — but there’s one thing I really, really do.

I miss the drama.

At the time, I was pretty conflicted about the giant morass of drama that got dropped on us in what was my third year — I hated it, but it was almost enjoyable in a weird ironic sort of way. And now I miss it.

I miss the burning feeling and the anguish of developing crushes on completely inappropriate people. I miss all the knowledge of other people’s lives that comes from being so regularly in contact with them. I miss trying to fix other people’s bad situations, I miss succeeding, and I miss failing. I miss having breakfast at KFC, though only two people know why. I miss baring the contents of our hearts until deep into the night. I miss the secrets and the gossip. I miss friends becoming lovers, and I miss friends becoming enemies. I miss finding the right things to say to the right people, and I miss failing at that too. I miss falling in love for the first time.

None of that is coming back, and perhaps I should be glad of that. After all, I just confessed to hating it. Absence makes the heart grow fonder, after all (or was it Absinthe?), so it’s probably for the best that it’s all safely confined to the past. But once every so often, just like now, I’ll reminisce about those times long ago.