Fifteen Megabytes
an excerpt

This is the story of how I became Alice. It's not a story I'm
particularly proud of, even though it made me famous, in a sense.

You've heard them say that everyone gets their fifteen minutes of
fame, right? For most people like me, it comes in underwhelming dribs
and drabs--a human interest spot on the local news, a picture in the
paper with our kids, a profile when we're employee of the week. When
the spotlight hits us, we accept the congratulations of family and
friends and feel the unfamiliar sensation of our cheeks flushing with
pride. We casually bring up our accomplishment while chatting with
the barista at Starbucks in the hopes she'll throw in an extra
celebratory espresso shot and we leave the paper casually open on the
table when our mother-in-law drops by in the afternoon. Or maybe
that's just me. In any case, we eventually relegate the newspaper
clipping to the memory box, next to our grade-school perfect
attendance certificates and our blue ribbons from the county fair
and, as quickly as it began, it's over. We get up in the morning,
take our kids to school, scrub down the toilets, fold the laundry,
and forget what it was like to not be invisible.

That's how it usually happens, but that's not what happened with me.
My son, Josh, calls it my "fifteen megabytes of fame." I think it
might have been even more than that. Fifteen gigabytes of fame--
that's the bigger one, isn't it? Josh would know. He's the one who
got me into it in the first place.

Josh is my oldest. He's fourteen years old and a computer whiz. At
least, it seems that way to me. I guess he's really just like all
fourteen-year-old boys now. They weren't even alive for a world
without the Internet. Email, chat, and text messages are as matter-of-
fact to them as telephones and color TV were to my generation. I
don't really consider myself technologically backward. I can send a
photo attachment with the best of them. I have a gmail account and I
did even before I got e-famous. I know who the Star Wars kid is and
sometimes find myself unconsciously humming that never-ending badger
song. I even read Perez Hilton instead of Us Weekly. I just don't
take it all for granted the way Josh does. I worry about stalkers and
pedophiles and I don't like using my debit card to buy things online.
He rolls his eyes at me when I talk about those things.

"Mom," he says, "Aren't you worried about the pedophiles hiding in
the bushes when I'm walking to school? That would be easier for them
than stalking me on the internet! And how come you'll give your debit
card to the server at Olive Garden? He looked shady to me. Did you
see that tattoo?"

For the record, I have nothing against tattoos. I think they're a
personal choice and, although I don't have any and won't allow my
children to have any until they're eighteen, I genuinely respect the
people who have chosen to decorate their bodies in that way.