Grey’s Anatomy

In 2006, accessing media without paying for it required elbow grease.
You couldn’t just steal someone’s Netflix/HBO Go/Amazon/Hulu Plus password.
Streaming wasn’t even really a thing yet.
And Kazaa was slow and unreliable.

I was big into Livejournal in those days.
I fancied myself a bit of a graphic designer.
My specialty was 100x100 icons (AKA avatars) that I created using (an illegally downloaded version of) Photoshop CS2 and step-by-step tutorials I found on Livejournal. In retrospect, I wasn’t really creating anything, just doing the digital art equivalent of paint-by-numbers.

In a fit of embarrassment and fear of being Google-able, I deleted my all Livejournal accounts a few years ago. I really wish I didn’t.

In addition to being an outlet and resource for my “art,” Livejournal was also a reliable source for download links. Reliability was key. How many times did you try to find an episode of Grey’s Anatomy on Kazaa, wait three hours for it to download, and lo and behold…porn. So many times.

Livejournal was what Tumblr is now. A safe place for people to geek out about their obsessions. So when someone in a “greys_anatomy_luvrs” community posted download links to seasons 1 and 2 of Grey’s Anatomy, there was no fear of downloading viruses or trojan horses or yes, porn.

I can’t remember if it was over a long weekend or during a school vacation, but there was a 48-hour period where my sister and I did nothing but download-watch, download-watch, download-watch, every episode from the first two seasons of Grey’s Anatomy.

Our 2002 Dell desktop was housed in the sun room. There was a massive, plush chair on the other side of the room. My sister and I dragged it over to the computer desk and sat hip-to-hip in that chair watching Grey’s Anatomy for two days. Our mom occasionally brought us snacks. What a great mom. Thanks, mom.

This wasn’t really about Grey’s Anatomy, was it?

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