originalsnobOG 2004

If you wanted to understand Liveia Martinez in a single image, picture this: it is late at night, a security alarm is screaming, and rather than freezing, she has already shoved a thirty-inch television away from a window, ripped the screen off, climbed out into the rain, and reached back for her friend. "Guess I just don't want to go out like that," she wrote afterward, with a smiley face. That was originalsnob in miniature -- a woman who moved through the world at full velocity and expected her reflexes to keep up. Livy, as everyone called her, arrived on eZabel in the summer of 2004 from Morristown, New Jersey -- a town she described with the precision of someone who had catalogued every one of its hundred-plus restaurants, its community theater that attracted Tony Bennett and Vanessa Williams, and its particular strain of snobbery that she found both insufferable and deeply funny. "Even the bus boys are funky," she observed. "It makes me think: You're just a bus boy, WHY R U tryin' to be PINCHED?!?" That word -- PINCHED -- was her own coinage, a term for people carrying themselves with an unearned hauteur, and it became the lens through which she filtered the entire world. The "snob" in her username was the joke; the originality was the point.

Over 2,426 comments and seven years, Livy established herself as one of eZabel's most distinctive voices: part poet, part filmmaker, part comedic essayist, part fearless cultural critic. She wrote original raps and dropped them into forum threads unannounced -- "The O is for Original, so you best step back / S is for the Snob 'cause she got it like that" -- and followed them with deeply felt poems about heartbreak and identity that read like song lyrics waiting for a melody. She was vegan with evangelical conviction about Silk Chocolate Cherry Chunk frozen dessert ("It is totally indistinguishable from dairy... if you've known me long enough I'll eventually coerce you into trying it") and would rattle off breakfast recipes -- cinnamon whole wheat apple pancakes from scratch, Vanilla Silk, orange juice blended with soy protein powder -- with the authority of someone who had workshopped every variable. She had a film project in production with thefunkyfresh cast in a funeral scene, plans for a DVD with outtakes and behind-the-scenes footage, and a personal to-do list that included becoming trilingual, mastering snowboarding, learning salsa dancing, getting Pilates certified, and upgrading her computer's RAM to 512MB. She approached all of these with equal seriousness.

What made Livy magnetic was the way she combined razor-sharp observation with genuine, almost reckless warmth. She would plan surprise anniversary parties using the colors the bride had originally picked for her wedding, volunteer to photograph a friend's ceremony and assemble a semi-formal album as a gift, and text everyone in her phone at dawn during a snowstorm to say "BE CAREFUL & DON'T RUSH!" She loved children with an intensity that startled people -- holding baby Isha at meetings and getting looks as if she had secretly given birth, watching a little Russian boy named Nikkita eat her popcorn at the movies and worrying whether he could chew the kernels. Her inner circle on eZabel ran through fivezero, socalgal, juicymango, and brotherman, with iwz as a steady presence she once cheerfully spammed on command after rocksupastar sent out a mass directive. She served in a Spanish-language congregation alone, sliding into Spanish mid-post when English could not quite land the point -- "¡No sabes cuanto me allegro a veer este foro!" -- and once saved herself from a stranger screaming after her at an ATM by instinctively switching to Spanish to ask a restaurant kitchen worker for help. "Saved my buns, let me tell you," she concluded.

Beneath the bravado and the wordplay was someone who had thought hard about the gap between how she presented herself and how people read her. In 2005, she wrote one of the most searingly honest posts in the eZabel archive: "While I'm trying to be positive to help myself move past the hard time I'm having, people are judging the person they think I am... it's the complete opposite: 'oh, she's TOO happy.' I'd almost like to sit down with these select few and say WHAT WOULD YOU HAVE ME DO?" She knew what it meant to be misread, and she returned to the theme again and again -- in threads about beauty standards where she dissected ten specific double standards in American media with the rigor of a cultural studies essay, in poems like "Devastated" and "Slither" that tracked the arc of being invested in someone who could not see her, and in blunt assessments of people who claimed to dislike cliques while always inviting only a select few. Life tested her: a twenty-day hospital stay in 2010 that began as an evening consultation and turned into something far longer, and then, that December, the death of her brother Jeremy -- "Jeremy who skateboarded, Jeremy who learned Chinese on his own, Jeremy who practiced my Spanish with me en las Santas Escrituras, Jeremy who has beat me into the new system." Even in grief, she wrote with the cadence of someone who processed the world by putting words to it.

Livy once described herself as "kingdom zeal in heels" and as "rollerblade girl & monkey in tree girl" and also "monkey fell from tree girl." She cracked a tooth rollerblading down a steep hill at speed, dove for a volleyball and shocked every brother in her hall who assumed she was delicate, got punched in the eye by an elderly sister's umbrella during a rainy-day ministry call, and responded to all of it by telling the story better than anyone else could have. She was the person who yelled "Why don't you sit down you FAT HIPPO!" at noisy upstairs neighbors and then discovered, to her horror, that they understood English. She was also the person who cried through Hallmark movies, swooned over James Dean's vulnerability in Rebel Without a Cause, and squealed at the end of Sixteen Candles when Sam sees Jake waiting across the street. Her final years on eZabel found her doing reconstructed clothing, addicted to Twitter, and declaring Pennsylvania her second home after years of border-hopping to visit friends. She had started the site as a twenty-year-old with a camera and a dream of making a DVD; she left it as someone who had been through fire and come out writing poems about it.

eZabel Personality Type: ENFJ -- "The Original." She read people quickly, cared about them fiercely, had standards she would defend with a rap verse or a ten-point essay, and organized her entire life around creating things and lifting people up. The "snob" part was just the filter she ran everything through so the warmth would not get taken for granted.