thatdarngirlOG 2002

A firestorm of opinions, ellipses, and unshakeable loyalty wrapped in a combat-booted package from Denville, New Jersey -- that was Lindsay Tymon on eZabel. She arrived in April 2002 and proceeded to leave her fingerprints on virtually every corner of the site, racking up over 6,400 comments across her peak years. Her writing style was unmistakable: stream-of-consciousness paragraphs punctuated by her beloved "yeah..so" constructions, sudden pivots into deeply personal territory, and a willingness to say the thing everyone else was only thinking. She once described herself as having a "chibi-lindsay" inside her head screaming "NOOO!" every time she opened her mouth -- and honestly, that inner voice lost more battles than it won, which made her one of the most entertaining voices on the site.

Lindsay was the beating heart of a tight-knit crew from the northern New Jersey congregations. She, Malibu (Julia Porrino), Legs (Amanda), Crazygirl (Heather), and Raerae (Rachel) were so inseparable that malibu once declared them sisters who were "no longer treated like guests at each other's houses." Her interaction scores tell the story -- fivezero (Brian), malibu, forrestina, socalgal, and skaorsk8 were her core orbit, with Brian serving as both her protector at concerts and the target of her teasing ("bad bad Bryan!!" for cutting band practice short). She organized events with remarkable energy: the Island Beach State Park bonfires, the formal, the Toasters shows, the Monday beach rituals. She was the one writing out meticulous driving directions to her house on Franklin Road, hounding people for RSVPs, and then good-naturedly scolding everyone who left their garbage behind because her non-Witness dad had to clean it up.

Her intellectual range was quietly impressive. She could pivot from a forensic breakdown of serial killer psychology from her criminology class to an impassioned defense of Faramir's characterization in The Two Towers to a scholarly analysis of Shakespeare's double meanings at Montclair State -- where she earned a straight A in the notoriously brutal Shakespeare course and scored in the top 15% on her Praxis II without studying. She was a voracious reader: To Kill a Mockingbird, Brave New World, The Count of Monte Cristo, The Bell Jar, Tolkien's appendices, the Star Wars Expanded Universe novels. She loved dystopian fiction so much she wrote her junior year history final on which dystopia was most likely to happen in the United States. She loved writing but admitted poetry was "completely out of my grasp," and her journal entries -- with titles like "Hurtling Through the Air" and "Lindsay Is the Essence of a Bunny Rabbit" -- were some of the most genuinely literary things ever posted on the site.

Musically, she was a punk-ska devotee with a deeply sentimental streak. Weezer and AFI sat at the top of her pantheon, but Bad Religion, the Toasters, Rx Bandits, Flogging Molly, and Sahara Hotnights filled out a playlist that could rival a mid-2000s Warped Tour lineup. She attended concerts with near-religious devotion, once declaring that her Weezer show at which Rivers said "I love you guys too" was a moment of perfect happiness. At an Rx Bandits show at the Knitting Factory, she told the bass player she liked the way he danced, got close enough to grab the lead singer's foot but wisely restrained herself, and declared plans to marry the entire band. She got trampled by large men in pits, had crowd surfers kicked into her head, and somehow always came back for more -- usually with her boyfriend Ben nearby as a human barrier.

About Ben: he was her anchor across most of her eZabel years, the boy whose family she was once so terrified of that she couldn't even say his parents' names, who worked at the Lexus dealership, who she took to Warped Tour and whose sister lost her grip on Lindsay's arm in the Rx Bandits pit. By 2007, she was planning a wedding -- hiring videographers, plotting with superhero about photographers and DJs, and calling him "my fiance." She was unapologetically domestic beneath the punk exterior: she dreamed of adopting "lots of little Asian girls," spent beach weeks playing Post-Its and eating Rita's Water Ice, named her cars (the Yeti, the Red Baron), and once confessed that she still sat on her mother's lap. She was makeup-retarded by her own proud admission, living in an all-girl household where nobody ever learned to blow-dry hair straight.

eZabel Personality Type: ENFP. The passionate, empathetic idealist who leads with feeling and intuition. Lindsay trusted people almost recklessly ("I can meet you one time and be ready to sit down and tell you my whole life story"), jumped into conflicts to defend underdogs even when it cost her socially, organized events and dragged reluctant friends along, and processed the world through narrative and emotion rather than logic. She had the ENFP's classic tension between wanting to be understood and fearing she'd said too much. She was warm, impulsive, fiercely principled, occasionally exhausting, and utterly irreplaceable -- the girl who would defend a stranger from a pile-on, drive to Pennsylvania to learn snowboarding on a whim, and then write 800 words about it that somehow made you feel like you were there.