malibuOG 2001

If you have ever stood in a supermarket aisle debating the structural viability of cotton as a chair material — out loud, for ten unbroken minutes, while your neighbor watches in stunned silence — then you already understand Julia Porrino. The rest of you will just have to catch up. From Stanhope, New Jersey, Julia arrived on eZabel in December 2001 with dark hair, an AIM handle born from little sisters who couldn't pronounce her name (MalibooJuju), and a mind that moved so fast it occasionally invented new verb tenses. "Droving," she once said, meaning "driving," and when people stared she had no idea why — "it makes sense to me cuz I'm really involved with what I'm saying." She chose her username after a friend told her she was "as dumb as a Malibu Barbie," which she found so funny she wore it like a crown. Her grandmother had always called her Barbie anyway. She was half Irish, quarter Italian, quarter Puerto Rican, five foot seven and closing in on five foot eight, and she could tan better than some of the full Italians on the site — a fact she made sure rocksupastar knew about.

Julia's 4,528 comments across eight years paint the portrait of someone who consumed the world in gulps. She read Catch-22 five times in a single semester ("the wittiest banter you will ever read"), posted the entirety of T.S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" alongside its Dante epigraph in the original Italian, and defended the Baby-Sitters Club in the same breath as Kafka's Metamorphosis. She tore through Colleen McCullough's thousand-page Roman history novels, devoured D.H. Lawrence for a senior paper specifically because her teacher said she'd be too dumb to understand it, and kept a running list of reading recommendations that pinballed from A Tree Grows in Brooklyn to Chuck Klosterman's Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs. She wrote in the margins of every book she owned — predictions, character maps, quotes she loved — and on the back cover she'd compile a cast list so she could remember who everyone was. She was the girl who cried in homeroom finishing The Lord of the Rings because she couldn't bear the fellowship breaking apart, and then told everyone it was because "the great things came to an end" and she feared the same would happen when her own friends started moving away.

Socially, Julia was a gravitational event. She shared threads with 145 different members, started 23 of her own, and maintained a 34-day commenting streak during her peak year of 2003, when she posted 2,112 comments — roughly six a day. Her crew was legendary: best friend Lynz (thatdarngirl), Amanda (legs), Heather (crazygirl), and Rachel (raerae), a group she publicly declared were "sisters anyways because we hang out like every day together and are no longer treated like guests at each other's houses." Beyond them she orbited constantly around forrestina, fivezero, and socalgal, organized surprise graduation parties with military precision, planned beach bonfires at Island Beach State Park, and once convinced an entire class field trip to detour to a burrito place in Denville. She was the kind of person who talked to the girl at McDonald's every time she went, who struck up friendships with the Hollywood Video staff because they recommended good movies, who introduced herself to strangers in forum threads just because the conversation looked interesting. sux2beme summed up their history in a single line: "I taught malibu how to put out a fire!"

Her inner world ran on sensation, noise, and movement. She needed music in every room — Frank Sinatra, the Temptations, Motown, War's "Lowrider" on repeat because it made her "feel pretty for some reason." She compiled sprawling party playlists that careened from Aretha Franklin to 50 Cent to Cotton Eye Joe, and she danced at every opportunity, though she got nervous when people watched. She surfed (Mike Kelly got her hooked), drove a '76 Volkswagen bus she eventually had to sell ("just the thought makes me wanna cry"), traveled to Spain where she danced in at least one fountain a day, backpacked through Greece on twenty-dollar-a-night hostels, and booked a trip to Rome with a layover in London long enough to flee the airport and see some sights. Her loves were held with total conviction: eggrolls were the best food in the world, full stop; balloons could rescue anyone from the worst mood imaginable — "I will be a fifty year old woman with a balloon one day"; and she hated the color white because she spilled red wine on every white shirt she ever owned, including memorably at her restaurant job when someone slapped her on the back and an entire glass of wine bled through to the undershirt. Her dislikes were equally precise: people who criticized her asthma breathing in college chemistry, anyone who sang karaoke seriously while being objectively terrible, and Darwin, whom she considered a traitor who stole his best friend's thirty-five years of research and published an eleven-page paper to beat him to print.

But what made Julia magnetic was not the velocity — it was the tenderness underneath it. She told the story of her grandfather at EPCOT's Italy pavilion without a shred of melodrama: he asked her to dance, she was too embarrassed, he danced with her grandmother instead, and six months later he was gone. "All I wanted to do was be back there so I could dance with him," she wrote, and left it at that. At his funeral she smiled and asked visitors about their lives because she didn't want to talk about it, then felt ashamed she hadn't cried — "he was in my top 3 of favorite people list." She kept old text messages for over a year and hoarded book reports from third grade because she liked to "vividly remember what I've been through." She once wrote a journal entry about how she hated change — how she loved the version of herself who got straight A's and did 132 cartwheels in a row (only stopping because she hit a tree) and danced in the rain for five hours straight. She wanted to be permanent, knowable, the same Julia at fifty as at seventeen. The world, of course, had other plans, and she processed every shift through humor and motion and an endless stream of words. Her sister flyingfree1125, her mom Robin, her little sister Annalisa who once burst out singing "Fergilicious" at the dinner table to their father's frozen horror — Julia collected these moments like photographs, obsessively and with genuine love.

She was the Drama Queen who could also explain why Truman dropped the bomb when viable alternatives existed, who knew that Alice in Wonderland was written by an Oxford mathematician to entertain his friend's daughter, who tried to buy one-third of a donut at Dunkin' Donuts with twenty-three cents and somehow walked out with the whole thing. She quoted Ferris Bueller's economics monologue verbatim and then pivoted into a passionate defense of witness wedding etiquette. She made up slang with her friend Shannon — "booty chedder" for something untrue, "caddy whampus" for things in disarray, "gravy noodles" for anything supremely cool — and deployed them in everyday life with zero self-consciousness. She wanted to name her future daughter Aurelia, after a woman in one of those Roman history novels, because "names that end in vowels are better for screaming cuz you can drag it out." In the end, Julia ran on connection — with people, with books, with music playing in every room, with the texture of sand and salt air and cheesecake and the phosphorescent bay in Puerto Rico where you could play tag in glowing green water on a moonless night. She felt everything at full volume and processed it all with a laugh that changed depending on her mood, her health, and how funny she thought the joke actually was.

eZabel Personality Type: ESFP — "The Drama Queen Who Read Dante." She acted first, reflected second, experienced the physical world with staggering intensity, extended warmth to every stranger she met, and spent her entire eZabel tenure figuring herself out one journal entry, one cartwheel, one balloon at a time.