suchgr8heightsOG 2003

The introduction went like this: "Hi, I'm a llama...I mean Alana...yea." And just like that, one tongue-tied syllable gave Alana Suarez a nickname that stuck harder than anything she actually chose. She arrived on eZabel in August 2003 under the handle hamsterlove, promptly asked iwz to delete the account because she didn't want SuchGr8Heights ghosting the site without her — then came roaring back a year later with 855 comments in 2004 alone, a number that suggested she had been saving up things to say. A Puerto Rican woman from Toms River, New Jersey, raised in what she called suburban whiteness, she moved through eZabel with the energy of someone who had too many interests to sit still and too much warmth to keep any of them to herself. She was studying to become an ASL interpreter, commuting an hour each way, burning CDs for thefunkyfresh's band shows, writing poetry in her journal at 1 AM while her hair stood straight up from absent-minded teasing, and making up errands to run because — as she put it — "The moment I have to sit down and turn the toob on is the moment I'm grabbing my keys and out the do'."

What made Alana magnetic was her ability to be entirely herself in every direction at once. She could trace the Panamanian origins of reggaeton with genuine scholarly precision — naming Tego Calderon and Daddy Yankee before either broke mainstream, explaining how Spanish rap templates fused with salsa rhythms — and in the same week post the entire Fresh Prince of Bel-Air theme song from memory. She bought En Vogue and TLC on CD at Princeton Record Exchange out of pure nostalgia, worshipped Death Cab for Cutie with a devotion that bordered on religious ("the glove compartment isn't accurately named...and everybody knows it!"), defended sad music as genuinely therapeutic rather than wallowing, and could drop Kanye West's All Falls Down verse by verse while dissecting his American Music Awards tantrum with affectionate exasperation. Her concert list read like someone who refused to pick a lane: Weezer, The Shins, Maroon 5, Counting Crows, Switchfoot, They Might Be Giants, and the legendary final Clonepod show with Guilderbell at Hamilton Street Cafe. She once described her music taste as "I like what I like...there is no classifying me." She meant it about everything.

She was a poet who never called herself one. The truck poem — "The truck has a bad driving record / It has yet to clear / The truck can say 'I think I can' / but can he continually steer?" — is a quiet romantic metaphor that works without announcing itself. "Your House" is a slow-building, aching invitation that ends with two people agreeing to get snowed in together. "In beautiful comfort" captures the paralysis of mutual attraction in twelve devastating lines. She posted Death Cab and Jimmy Eat World lyrics like dispatches from her emotional frontline, but her own verses held their own alongside them. She also had an easy facility with Spanish that she deployed with precision, greeting people in full sentences or explaining a dish: "Let the plantains ripen to almost black, slice them thick and fry 'em ONCE to get sweet plantains." She loved making tostones for friends and once offered to teach malibu the proper technique, insisting on thick-cut, double-fried, dipped in salted warm water — "perfection."

Her closest friendships on eZabel were with fivezero, sunshyne, and socalgal, and those relationships had the texture of real intimacy — late-night, circular, specific. She and fivezero had the kind of sibling-adjacent chemistry where his getting a buzz made her act silly by proximity: "When fivezero has a few drinks, I get tipsy." She and sunshyne exchanged dresses, discussed book studies, and talked each other through the particular loneliness of being a single adult at a convention where "the extent of your association being 'Hi, how are you? Good.' Pretending you had other people to talk to." She missed the old days when she talked so much at lunch she barely moved from her seat; now she was making laps until she broke a sweat. But she didn't wallow. She widened out with deliberate intention, building circles across multiple friend groups because her interests were too varied for any single one. She went to rocksupastar's events, traveled to England for her friend Gemma's wedding, chatted up the Dunkin Donuts drive-thru workers so often they greeted her by voice, and threw a gathering she called "Arroz con You" because she genuinely wanted to feed people and talk to them — "ew, definitely NOT a movie, we'd leave not knowing eachother any better and I hate that!"

On the forums, Alana was funny and direct in a way that could read as blunt if you didn't know the warmth underneath it. She called out a guy who went "all up IN my grill" one day, cited his privileges the next, then turned around and approached her friend — "THINK b4 you ACT fellas." She dissected the mechanics of crushes and courtship with the rigor of someone who genuinely wanted to understand the system, not just navigate it. She started threads like "Deadline" and "n. crush" that became sprawling Macking forum conversations where she and socalgal and kingadrock debated whether guys give up on girls who don't signal interest fast enough. She was honest about her own patterns — "perhaps I have too much faith in something before it unfolds" — and she had the self-awareness to recognize her social worker impulse as both gift and liability: "that social worker mentality that doesn't allow you to flee, but summons you to try and help. Wish I had less of that." Her brother Brian was her comic foil and emotional anchor. He once hid jalapenos in her backpack and crumbled cookies into her coat pockets. He sprinkled pepper on her face while she slept. She narrated these stories with the exasperated love of someone who wouldn't trade him for anything, and by 2006, she was booking her wedding photographer through juicymango, describing her fiance as "the kinda guy that would get along just fine in an amish village with no electricity."

eZabel Personality Type: ENFP — "The Llama." Warm, socially omnivorous, emotionally perceptive, and incapable of sitting still when there were people to meet, songs to quote, plantains to fry, and poems to write at 1 AM. She had her foot in several circles and her heart in all of them. The girl who told random strangers they were hot just to make their day, who wrote unsent letters as a form of forgiveness, who rocked the buddy-holly-girl look in boot-cut jeans and cardigans, and who — when life got heavy — turned to Damien Rice, Death Cab, and the book of Isaiah in roughly equal measure. She contained multitudes and was not remotely sorry about it.