originalsnobOG 2004

There is a name behind the handle, and it matters: Livy — or more precisely, Liveia — is the kind of person whose very name comes with a story. Pronounced "live-E-A," she always felt it really should have been spelled "Livia." Roman in origin, pertaining to the olive tree, and (as she discovered) once belonging to an emperor's wife who was savvy but ruthless. She found that last part funnier than she probably let on. Born and raised in Morristown, NJ — a town with over a hundred restaurants and a community theater that has hosted Tony Bennett and Vanessa Williams — Livy grew up fluent in the texture of a place that is simultaneously historic and a little snooty. She has long had opinions about that dynamic, and she will share them with you, colorfully, whether you asked or not.

Livy is a creator at her core. Her corpus is saturated with film projects, original song lyrics, poetry, choreography ambitions, and an ongoing cinematic project that had thefunkyfresh and others cast in bit roles and behind-the-scenes footage. She spent years working toward a DVD with extras, outtakes, and spoofs — the kind of vision that takes a person who does not think small. Her to-do list at one point included becoming trilingual, mastering snowboarding, learning swing and salsa dancing, obtaining Pilates certification, and getting her memory upgraded to 512MB. The last item was a RAM upgrade for her computer. The first several were for herself. She approached personal growth with the same systematic, deadline-driven energy she applied to everything else, and she was entirely serious about all of it. Her favorite scripture was Psalms 37:10-11; her favorite movie, in the drama category, was The Notebook, which made her "cry like a FOOL." She held both of these things simultaneously without any apparent contradiction.

The "snob" in her screen name is both a joke and a slight misnomer. She coined the word PINCHED — P-I-N-C-H-E-D — to describe people or situations that were just wrong somehow, people carrying themselves with an unearned hauteur, hard-luck faces, bad vibes. The distinction matters to her: she is exacting in her standards, yes, but not cold. She is the person who writes elaborate, warm comments of encouragement to struggling friends, who shows up to help decorate for a couple's surprise anniversary party using the colors the bride originally picked for her wedding that never happened, who accompanies an elderly sister on a rainy-day ministry call and nearly gets punched in the eye by a sombrilla, and considers it a funny story worth telling. Her Musings presence — over a thousand comments — was defined by exactly this combination: sharp observations, genuine investment in people, and a sense of humor that ran from deadpan to deeply silly. She once rhymed her own name into a rap ("The O is for Original, so you best step back / S is for the Snob 'cause she got it like that"). She meant every word.

Her crew on eZabel centered on fivezero, socalgal, juicymango, and brotherman — a constellation she navigated with warmth and her characteristic directness. She was fluent in Spanish (attending a foreign-language congregation alone, responsible for herself in every way, as she put it) and brought that bilingual identity into how she moved through the world, sliding into Spanish mid-post when English wasn't quite landing the point. She was also vegan — with strict opinions about soymilk substitutions, Goya products, dark leafy greens, and the moral geography of the dairy industry — and she was the kind of vegan who would quietly coerce you into trying a chocolate-cherry chunk nondairy frozen dessert until you admitted it tasted exactly like real ice cream. She had thought a lot about race, media representation, beauty standards, and identity, and she wrote about all of it with more analytical care than the format usually demanded.

What the corpus reveals, underneath the bravado and the wordplay and the original music, is someone who had been genuinely hurt by the gap between how she presented herself — upbeat, funny, busy — and how some people seemed to read her. She wrote about this directly in 2005: trying to stay positive through hard times, only to have people assume she was too happy, too much, or not enough; being judged on a performance of wellness rather than the reality of it. She knew what it was to be misread. She also knew what it was to surprise herself — pushing a television away from a window during a false alarm, climbing out into the rain, reaching back for her friend. Guess I just don't want to go out like that. That sentence is probably the most Livy sentence in the entire archive.

eZabel Personality Type: ENFJ. Extraverted feeling dominant, with a rich inner creative life that requires expression. She reads people quickly, cares about them genuinely, has strong values and will defend them, and organizes her energy around bringing things into being — films, songs, events, community. She can be forceful when pushed, but her default register is warmth. The "snob" part is just the filter she runs everything through so the warmth doesn't get taken for granted.