sunshyneOG 2004

The first thing Summer Valenti did upon joining eZabel in July 2004 was send a message to thatdarngirl: "I have finally succumbed to the ezabel tide." She signed it with a tilde and her real name, because Summer was not the kind of person who hid behind a screen name. Her sisters forrestina and yodasucka were already well established on the site, and Summer had been lurking for weeks — reading posts about herself, getting increasingly irritated that she couldn't respond. What finally broke her was when legacy claimed she'd dyed his hair green. "It was only green hairspray," she needed everyone to know, and so an account was created. Within her first ten days she had posted original poetry, three dinner recipes (beef, chicken, and pork — "for variety"), a detailed breakdown of the interrobang as a punctuation mark, a ranked list of purebred cat breeds, an offer to personally score anyone's Myers-Briggs test so they wouldn't have to pay fifteen dollars, and a virtual classroom link about Aztec civilizations she'd dug up from a Massachusetts school district for a stranger who'd asked. She then cheerfully confessed: "im just guessing. its the big sister in me that is bound and determined to come up with feasible answers to everyones questions."

Summer was the firstborn grandchild in her family — her grandparents called her "Number One" — and she carried that oldest-child energy with an almost superhuman grace. She was the one who actually answered people's questions, provided links, offered help, and followed up. She ran the eZabel Book Club. She posted reviews of every book she read, which was roughly one every three days. Jane Austen's Mansfield Park was her favorite novel. She attempted Ulysses and couldn't finish it — "a friend told me its easier if you have a reading partner" — but she tore through everything from Grace Paley to Ursula K. Le Guin to The Time Traveler's Wife ("easily the best book ive read in about a year") to Eats, Shoots & Leaves, which she found hysterical "aside from her distain for the interrobang." She typed out Shel Silverstein poems and Marvin Gaye lyrics with equal enthusiasm. She knew that Lewis Carroll photographed children in the nude and that D.H. Lawrence was generally considered a writer of erotica. She posted a song her younger sister had written for her in elementary school — "s is for youre always sunny and happy / u is for you are so very pretty / m is youre melodious you love to sing" — and somehow it didn't feel sentimental. It felt like evidence.

Dancing was probably her most central joy. At age five, at a congregational sleepover, she'd danced her "little tail off" to "Let It Whip" in what became a legendary performance — "look cathy i can twist all the way to the floor!" She and her best friend later learned the entire Janet Jackson "Rhythm Nation" routine on coffee tables repurposed as a stage. As an adult, she taught herself salsa from a friend's grandmother who coached her from the kitchen while cooking dinner: "no no stop moving your shoulders. you look american." She came in second place in a swing dancing contest and third in a salsa competition. She offered to teach flomojopoanode to dance and meant it completely. She also loved rollerblading through Saddle River Park, gardening (she had a three-year-established herb garden she had to abandon in a move), her cats Fagiolina and Felino (the brother was "an unbeliever" who refused to attend family study, while the sister attended every week), Strawberry Shortcake dolls, dark chocolate with espresso from the register at Target, and the 1980s in general. She had an alphabetized list of Italian names for future pets, organized by species: Guido and Gatolina for cats, Canino and Carina for dogs, Ilario and Irene for fish. "Yes, i do have a problem."

In the fall of 2004, Summer's family moved from Bergen County, North Jersey to a rural area near the South Jersey shore — trading thirty minutes from Manhattan for thirty minutes from the beach, a small shared bathroom for five acres and her own guest room, and her established social world for a congregation of a hundred strangers who "seem to keep to themselves." She processed this with characteristic openness: "i crave change. i think its exciting and wonderful. its also jarring and a little scary." She was lonely. She missed her sisters, who no longer lived with her. She tried to get up to North Jersey at least once a month. But she also threw herself into the new life — she attended ten eZabel events in barely a year, from apple picking to bonfires to the Ocean's Twelve opening night. Her closest eZabel bond was with fivezero, whose warm, mutual directness anchored her whole tenure on the site. suchgr8heights became a constant confidante — they swapped outfit advice for weddings, strategized about boys, and Summer sent a stream of messages that toggled between sisterly warmth and cheerful mischief ("ok there was a little of 'dont try it heffa' ill admit it"). socalgal got the full Summer introduction treatment — a self-summary, a family tree, and an immediate warmth that made long-distance friendship feel inevitable.

What made Summer extraordinary wasn't just her extroversion — she scored nine out of ten on the introversion/extroversion scale and was deeply, cheerfully proud of it — but the way she combined relentless social energy with genuine intellectual curiosity and moral seriousness. She gave honest advice to teenagers about crushes ("no kissing until you are engaged"), defended people she thought were being treated unfairly, and then explained exactly why her defense didn't constitute an attack. She could be pointed when necessary — "the official motto of ezabel is 'who cares'" — and she could be tender. She wrote poetry and posted it publicly, including a self-portrait that asked: "Are you as smart as you look? Or are those glasses a front?" She admitted that she was a late bloomer whose "macking sweet spot is 20" and that she'd rather be single indefinitely than link up with the wrong person: "i am reasonably content alone and dont want to swap that for anything." She described herself as having "many policies," including one against cuddling with strange boys and another against hugging seated boys while standing. She bit a dentist once when she was two. She ate corn on the cob by prying each kernel off with her bottom teeth. She used six highlighters to study her Watchtower. She was, in 1,444 comments across two blazing years, entirely and irreducibly herself.

eZabel Personality Type: ENFP — "The Champion." Enthusiastic, imaginative, intensely people-focused, and constitutionally incapable of being boring. She knew her type, she knew the celebrity list cold (Robin Williams, Sandra Bullock, Ariel from The Little Mermaid), and she would have scored you for free so you could know yours too.