sunshyneOG 2004

When Summer Valenti joined eZabel in July 2004, she arrived with her sisters Forreste and Melody already well established on the site, and she hit the ground running. Within days she was posting recipes, Myers-Briggs analyses, original poetry, and detailed breakdowns of the interrobang as a punctuation mark. In her first week she had already produced more substantive forum content than some members managed in a year. Her eZabel handle, SunShyne, was bestowed by a friend on MSN Messenger who thought it suited her, and she immediately started "plotting on how to get more ppl to use it." It absolutely suits her. She is, without qualification, the most enthusiastically extroverted person on the site — and she knows it: she scored 9 out of 10 on the extroversion scale when she ran the Myers-Briggs questions on herself.

She is Forreste's and Melody's older sister, the firstborn grandchild in her family (her grandparents called her "Number One"), and she carries that oldest-child energy in the most functional possible way: she actually answers people's questions, provides links, offers help, and follows up. When a stranger asked about Aztec civilizations, she dug up a virtual classroom URL from a Massachusetts school district. When someone needed recipes, she posted three — beef, chicken, and pork, helpfully balanced "for variety." She learned to use her younger sisters as a kind of social introduction system on eZabel, with Forreste and Melody serving as references before she'd even made an account.

Summer's intellectual range is genuinely striking. She was reading Jane Austen and Grace Paley in the same week she attempted Ulysses (she couldn't finish it — "a friend told me its easier if you have a reading partner"). She knew the ENFP celebrity list cold: Robin Williams, Sandra Bullock, Bill Cosby, Ariel from The Little Mermaid. She typed out the lyrics to Marvin Gaye's "Let's Get It On" with evident joy. She identified herself as a committed follower of the Keirsey Temperament sorter and offered to score anyone's answers personally so they wouldn't have to pay $15. She listed her favorite scripture (Jeremiah 29:11), her favorite ice cream (strawberry), and her favorite board game (Yahtzee, or however you spell that).

Dancing was probably her most central joy — she mentioned it repeatedly, described perfecting the Janet Jackson "Rhythm Nation" routine with her best friend on coffee tables used as a stage, and at age five allegedly danced her "little tail off" at a sleepover to "Let It Whip" in a moment that became congregational legend. She also loved the beach, rollerblading in Saddle River Park, gardening (she had a three-year-established herb garden she had to leave behind in a move), her cats Fagiolina and Felino, and the 1980s in general. She was moving from North Jersey to a rural area near the South Jersey shore as her eZabel activity peaked — a big change that she processed with characteristic openness: "I crave change. I think its exciting and wonderful. Its also jarring and a little scary."

She was warm, self-possessed, and almost aggressively positive — but not in a shallow way. She wrote poems she posted publicly. She gave honest advice to teenagers about crushes and to guys about how to read a girl's signals. When someone on the forum got picked on in a way she thought was unfair, she apologized directly and specifically, then explained exactly why she didn't think it counted as an attack. She could be playful ("the official motto of ezabel is 'who cares'") and she could be pointed when she needed to be. fivezero was her closest eZabel confidant, and their dynamic — warm, mutual, full of inside references — anchored her whole tenure on the site.

eZabel Personality Type: ENFP — enthusiastic, imaginative, intensely people-focused, and constitutionally incapable of being boring. She knew her type and was deeply, cheerfully proud of it.