English Recordings

Advancing Me: Trials and Tribulations
In three words? Constantly fluctuating continuum. I have journeyed to my cliff’s edge and back, panting, racing in fervor of complete information overload. I am astounded at the sheer amount of data that exists within and is perpetually produced by this mighty, fickle creature of our own design. We’ve even given it a pet name, dropping the first ‘t’ to “innernet”. Not cute.
I’m similarly overwhelmed by the diversification of social media. Open source code has changed the way consumers and companies are thinking, nevermind ultimately putting those insights into practice profitably. A phenomenal cultural explosion of collaborative collective intelligence – I’ll attest it’s the first time I’ve been motivated to change my behavior so quickly. It feels like someone else has strapped my furiously pounding heart into the seat of a jet and went from 0-160 in less than two seconds. My dreams of having a video blog aren’t coming true anytime soon, as I’m contentedly gallivanting between the silver linings of cloud content. Props to my new perspective: when I look at a computer screen, I truly, passionately wonder who’s out there looking back at me. Doesn’t that make you infinitely curious?

My academic prowess has made me notorious in my own right. Before my latest internet epiphany, I had started to rely less on social media to make statements about my identity or ideal self. My own activity by these means had amounted to nothing but trite and unexciting blather for people with too much free time. I hadn’t been participating in these channels because I wanted to, but because I felt I had to. Grappling with the concept of autonomy, I had been replacing meaningful interaction with mechanical monotony. Filling the void with nothingness wasn’t cutting it. As knight in tennis shoes and shining armor; Bruce, you’ve introduced me to social media as a shapeshifting portal for personal satisfaction, but educated me to not compromise the identity I’ve worked so tirelessly to plan, design, and implement. I was enlightened to the possibilities of enhancing and extending my image instead of sagaciously [superciliously] stuffing it.
You hailed me at the gates to the universe of Web 3.0.

Summer of 2009 rained in. For three NASE credits I spent a week in Cape Cod chasing copepods and sketching Spartina alterniflora, every day posting photos of my journeys to Facebook with running commentary. Shortly thereafter, for three EC credits I muscled through Intermediate Price Theory, using Google to carve out answers to impossible homework assignments. Simultaneously, I rocked the socks off of my GB 301 profs, my team getting the highest grades in our section. Ironic, considering I spent class time posting egregious commentary mocking the mind-numbing lectures. I still had yet to tackle the hardest semester of my academic career.
Fall 2009 was a bitch. I fought tooth and nail for my spot at the head of the pack. Not only will I be graduating one year early, but I’m now poised to hold my MBA in one year’s time. There’s appeared a bright light at the end of this tunnel, and I’ve broken off at a sprint, headstrong. A big fish in a small pond, I’m growing outspoken amongst my classmates. Amongst some, I sense, disdained. People whose names I don’t know will excitedly wave at me across the quad, hurry over and ask if it were really me they’d seen behind the Library desk (who’da thunk it), or stocking the Falcon Market, or smiling at the bookstore, or teaching students as professor-for-a-day!

Using mental images of certain suitemates spontaneously combusting, I quit smoking, hit the gym every day, and my ideal self continued to shift out. I engaged friends both current and potential in person and online. I even signed up for a Twitter account, created an eBay store for random trinkets, and was considering starting a video blog. Facebook was renowned by the Bentley bubble as a home-wrecking end-all be-all. I was smart enough to heed my mother’s premonitions and adapt to changes in the privacy policy. Short-lived JuicyCampus meted demise to an unlucky few, inspiring fear among the masses. The Vanguard known for eloquent exposés of foolhardy drunkards, went digital to always keeping readers coming back for more. MenuMunchies.com (sometimes, you just get mad hungry) made it easy to find, select, and obtain takeout, even at 2:45 in the morning. A mere bystander as globalization riddled bulletholes in business strategies, the integration of television, internet, mobile devices, and humans heralded a new era. The power of the group was undermining a marketer’s ability to control the online user experience. I made buzzwords like cloud computing, rich content, and new media my vernacular, awestruck as their mutations slipstreamed before my eyes. I could feel the power vested in me as a modern virtual consumer, but still I couldn’t see the forest for the trees.

Defining Me: False Cognates
Within the first few moments after I got out of my car, I was already getting the up and down from a pair of big brown eyes across the parking lot. I reminded myself it was just the car (2005 Mustang GT) and only Freshman Orientation. Here I was again, transplanted into a world where I knew no one but myself. I could be any one I wanted, but this time it was my lips and vocal cords doing the work instead of my fingertips. Grateful for a second chance to get me right, I got a roommate and a boyfriend and proceeded to merrily bury myself in schoolwork. The next year, I moved in with five new suitemates, and dealings with the S.O. got to be parasitic. I broke it off and debriefed the suite, but was generally miserable until I realized I could turn my troubles into opportunities.

I was granted fifteen minutes. I waited seven minutes for the page to load completely. I clicked on the first link, and HTTP 404 Not Found. Backtracking, I spent another seven minutes glaring at the white pixels before I was wheeled away backwards from the screen. Right before Christmas, my parents came and rescued me from that burgeoning, blistering hellhole despite management’s claims that I would end up back in the program before New Year’s. As if I had been reborn, I persisted to prevail.
As I transitioned into senior year (miraculously I could still graduate with my class), my attitude toward technology became ambivalent. I saw the good and I saw the evil, but I didn’t know what side I wanted to root for. Facebook was just appearing at the side-lines; I had deleted my xanga and MySpace, and rarely logged on to AIM for anything but insipid banter. New internet (notice the capitalization change) services were blooming before my eyes. I found College Board, Mapquest, and Coffee Break Arcade. I even began to eyeball my cereal boxes, checking for URLs that would deliver me to online sugar-coated marshmallow oases. Using the technology became normal again. Bound in chains no longer, I opened my eyes and embraced the inevitable. I was going to college.

Months lingered until the leaves changed, and my life was radically spinning out of control. Maintaining the “cool” online was getting easier, but among fellow AP scholars “smart” was commonplace. My grasp on experthood was slipping; I was getting closer and closer to the edge of a cliff . Tight money, flunking brother, wine-o mother, and temper-riddled father led to dysfunction. I found myself disinterested in my former pastimes, burnt out from sleepless nights, and feeling fully responsible for the daily household screaming matches.
Anorexia gave me back my power, it put my body back in my control. At seventy-two pounds, I was shipped off to Klarman at McLean Hospital (right down the road from here, actually) for fifty-six days of residential inpatient treatment. Here I resorted to knitting, Sudoku, a handwritten diary, and fingernail painting as diversions from the daily drab of computer-less group discussions. Eventually, a rumor surfaced that a few girls were plotting to steal a computer in parts from one of the unoccupied offices near the cafeteria. We were questioned extensively about our habits, and to our surprise a rinky-dink model appeared in one of the function rooms by the end of the week. Personally, I wasn’t sure if I was yet ready to plunge the online world. Who would I be now?

“Shut up, and sit down”, she said. Forget the nuances of netiquette, Steele belabored the benefits of physical exercise, diagrammed the dynamic of aerobic respiration, and shoved her high school shot-put and pole vaulting career to the pit of my stomach. An hour later I was feeling affronted and abhorrent as I trudged out of her office. I tried to reframe the situation in light of skepticism, someone could be watching, tracking my every click. Paranoid, I painfully regretted the countless hours I’d spent poised thirty centimeters from the screen. Someone could find me, kidnap me and take me to a place with no computers and no chocolate. Leery and lonely, I deserted the Internet and its diversions. I spent significantly less time just surfing, only visiting the sites that were recommended by the librarian for researching project topics.
2005. As a high school junior, I was expected to use applications like MySpace, xanga, and AIM to hobnob, even if only peripherally, with the popular kids. Instead of calling my house phone number to “hang out”, classmates would ask for my “screen name”. Bashfully, I must confess this is the year I started asking friends to chill instead of come over to play. I believed I could be whomever I pleased in these virtual worlds, a reincarnation of my chat room days,. Instead of a slightly rotund, mouse-haired girl with fang teeth braces and a uni-brow, I could create an identity that completes my ideal self. I vowed to prove my intelligence online because I somehow couldn’t manage offline. I assured myself that unlike school, I wouldn’t be ridiculed for wearing Wal-Mart’s bell-bottoms with pink shag fur trim and cow print vest, because people couldn’t see the real me. I constantly brawled with the balance of truth and lies. If my xanga screen name was any indication [atormentedsoul00], I was on the brink of a severe identity crisis.

I remember going to a Saturday detention in the principal’s office for playing hooky from gym class at the library for the third time in two weeks. I’d figured her secretary would be brooding over me until I could put on a big enough pout and mash my puppy-dog eyes together enough times to draw tears, after which I would be promptly sent home. Instead, I found our hair-sprayed, high-heeled, hard-ass principal (Mrs. Steele, who drove a low pro matte black Corvette Z06) with her arms folded neatly across her pant-suited bosom. A besmirching grin puckered over her visage that froze me aghast after having practically sashayed into her office. She asked me what I thought was so special about computers that made them better than playing dodge ball in gym class. Immature and still generally clueless, I asked her what I was learning while I sweated it to the sixties amid blubbery teeny bopper bimbos and death metal jock straps. I told her very frankly that gym class on the whole was entirely worthless to me and my learning was better accomplished in front of a computer.

High school: “everything must be typed!” Teachers claimed it wasn’t our terrible penmanship but rather an institutional initiative to integrate. Adapting teaching with technology was old hat for me, so I excelled naturally in the classroom environment The school used eMacs and OSX instead of my preferred Microsoft Bob for Windows. Back then I was less distracted by the functionality differences than I am today, the catch-22 of an HFID major. It was still all black hat magic to me.
Massive sixty-four bit color screens and sleek all-in-one curves accented by the vermilion glow of optical mice composed in concentric circles in front of the circulation desk. Quickening my pulse during my first full-screen music video on YouTube; I gasped aloud when I realized how much bigger the sniper scope appeared in Unreal Tournament; practically fainting when by accident I enabled multiple browser tabs - my head was spinning. I was used to a heavily fragmented, firewalled, freakish excuse for a computer – eMac was suave, sexy, and smooth. The velocity at which I could prune the vines was the vindication of my victory.
I could care less what lipgloss the hoochies in the hall were wearing, how many times I got stuffed in a locker, or who I sat next to at the lunch table. On the Internet I got inklings I was uncovering the secret potion that kept me so transfixed. I realized if other people used the Internet, they could be playing the pretending game just like I had. These people could be writing stuff on websites that wasn’t true, or worse, writing code for viruses that would ruin it for everyone. Google changed the way I looked for things, but it only aggravated my rabid raucousness for random knowledge. I would retrieve and arrange elaborate towers of oversize books around my workstation in an attempt to conceal myself from any and all human contact. Although I was at first scolded repeatedly by the persnickety librarian, I eventually won her over in confidence so I could engage in my enchantments worry-free.