Oh dear, I didn't think I would end up rambling like this. Please excuse my wall of text.
My, my. I had totally forgotten about this over the past few days. Like I said in the OP, I grew up in a house that had satellite TV. I was not a very social child. I was always either in in front of the TV or deep in a book. Cartoon Network played re-runs of things like Voltron and Speed Racer, those were probably my first taste of anime. I was coming home from first grade one day in 1998 or so. Back then, we had a big Sony Trinitron sitting on top of this ancient wood-paneled behemoth of a console TV in the basement at my grandma's house. I would usually run down to the basement and hang out down there until I fell asleep on the pullout couch. But that day, something caught my eye. That something was Dragon Ball Z. Now, I had watched a fair bit of Pokemon, but this was something different. It took me by complete surprise. Fast forward a few years and I was running as fast as my little asthmatic body could take me so I could get home early enough to catch the latter half of a Sailor Moon episode before DBZ came on. Then, I would stay up late to watch Gundam Wing. We moved to a new house in 2001. That meant a new neighborhood with a new school full of new kids. I wasn't very social before, and I was even less social then. Late 2001 struck a chord for me when Adult Swim started airing. We were still pretty new in that house. I didn't even have a bed yet, so I slept on the couch in the living room. The only things in that living room were said couch and a TV much smaller than the one from my grandma's basement. If I wanted to stay up late, I had to park myself right in front of it. That was the first time I had heard the word anime. When I saw Cowboy Bebop for the first time, I knew it was something different. For the first few months, that was a sort of ritual of mine; making sure my mom and my sister were asleep, grabbing some snacks as stealthily as I could, and watching Cowboy Bebop, FLCL, Yu Yu Hakusho, and everything else that Adult Swim and TechTV's Anime Unleashed had to offer. In 2003, I met my best friend in sixth grade. We bonded in an English class. The teacher would bring in books every so often to add to the class library. She'd hold the new book up in front of the class and say something about it. The book that brought us together was the first volume of Rave Master. That would launch me into my first taste of otaku culture, but would also set me off to be pretty obnoxious for a few years. I even joined an anime club, though it was a club in name only. Me and three other people would meet in the library after school and pass around a Shonen Jump, play Yu Gi Oh, and talk about games. It got disbanded after a few weeks after someone's deck got stolen. Between high school and college I took a gap year. I became very depressed and did not leave the house or socialize very much. That's when I started watching anime as it was airing, the first of which was K-On!. I would continue to consume anime throughout college. And that leads me to now, where I've been sitting around for a few months. I'm typically a season or two behind, barring a few shows that really catch my attention. Watching anime is one of the few things that brings me genuine enjoyment.