shessomepirateOG 2004

A self-proclaimed starving artist with a PowerBook, a boxer puppy, and an encyclopedic knowledge of mid-2000s indie rock, Sarah Fonseca sailed into eZabel in March 2004 and immediately made herself at home in the Music Talk forum. Her username was not just a quirky handle — it was a mission statement. She proudly pirated all her music, declaring "like a pirate i like to tear down the system by downloading all my music" while rattling off acquisitions from Death Cab for Cutie, The Jealous Sound, and small brown bike with the satisfied air of someone who had just pulled off a heist. Her taste was staggering in its breadth: a single comment once listed over sixty bands spanning The Cure, Radiohead, Smashing Pumpkins, Belle & Sebastian, The Mars Volta, Coheed and Cambria, Elliott Smith, and the Beatles — a playlist that read like the entire inventory of a college radio station. She saw an absurd number of live shows for someone her age, keeping meticulous ticket stubs and journaling every lineup from Incubus and Weezer to My Chemical Romance and Saves the Day, all while maintaining that The Cure's Disintegration was the album most likely to make her cry and Robert Smith was simply "amazing."

Sarah was studying art at the county college, and her design chops showed up everywhere — she helped flomojopoanode redo graphics in Illustrator, schooled people on the difference between 72 dpi web images and print-ready vectors, and kept redesigning her personal website (informationerror.com) through iterations named "mac-n-cheese" and "sexico" because she got bored with each version before it was finished. She described herself as "so manish" despite looking and talking like a girl, explaining that her man-mentality was inherited from her mom and was the reason most of her closest friends were guys. That self-awareness ran deep. In one of eZabel's more quietly devastating journal entries, titled "if sarah died," she wrestled with being the person who always holds the door, always lets other cars go first, always drives to Philadelphia at a moment's notice to help a friend — and wondering when karma would come back around for her. She was close with the NJ crew, especially fivezero, thatdarngirl, and suchgr8heights, attending events from apple picking to the Ocean's Twelve premiere, and bonding with forrestina over relationship advice and with ophelia over guilty pleasures — including the Spice Girls, which she blamed entirely on having three younger sisters. When deanh77 started quoting The Streets lyrics at her, she fired back with her own Mike Skinner impression, proving she could hold her own across genres. By 2005, she and Jesse were together — a fact thatdarngirl gleefully outed on the site before Sarah was ready, prompting a laughing protest about the gossip that would inevitably follow.

eZabel Personality Type: ISFP — "The Concert Stub Archivist." Sarah was the rare eZabel member who was simultaneously tough and tender — a self-described brute who cried at Smiths songs, a design student who kept SpaghettiOs on her desk, a Jersey girl who dreamed of Italy and Greece. She burned bright for barely two years, leaving behind 72 comments, a sprawling concert history, a personal website that never stopped evolving, and the lingering smell of burnt deer from her brother's car that she would never, ever let anyone forget.