I, Justine: An Analog Memoir

by Justine Ezarik

There’s a growing concern that social media platforms are only making us more antisocial, that technology is actually an impediment to honest human connection. But the Internet brought me out of my shell. It has put me in touch with some of the most influential and important people in my life. It has brought me solace and comfort in times of distress. And based on the remarkable amount of tweets and private messages I’ve received over the years, the Internet has allowed my experiences to bring comfort and solace to other people, too.

  That’s not to say it’s always been a virtual bed of roses. I’ve been accused, frequently, of not being a “real” gamer. I’ve been described—in a reputable tech publication—as someone who “compensates” for her “unfunniness” with “bug-eyed, squealing enthusiasm.” Like far too many people who choose to share pieces of their life online, I’ve received a colorful array of profanity-laced death threats.

  The good has far outweighed the bad, though. It’s possible that living my life online has even made me a better person—it’s reminded me that what you see on the web is only a sliver of any one person’s real life. In fact, I seriously considered titling this book Tweets I Never Sent, just as a reminder that no matter how much access you seemingly have to any one person online, you will never really know his or her whole story. Even when I was live-streaming, there were times when I said the camera battery had died, just so I could turn the thing off and catch a bit of a break from being iJustine. Even though I tweet anywhere from ten to fifty times a day, there have been moments when I chose not to share a particularly devastating piece of news I received at Christmastime, or to publicize that the tires were once stolen from my car while it was parked in my very own driveway, or to admit that a prank call led to a middle-of-the-night visit from the SWAT team, or to reveal that I once traveled to Hawaii with a boyfriend who didn’t want to be on camera, leaving the Internet to believe that I was either (a) traveling, for some strange reason, entirely alone or (b) a closet lesbian.

  Telling the whole story, for once, is the other reason I decided to write this book.

  My life online has been a crazy, strange, amazing, and unpredictable journey—I have no idea where it will lead next; I’m still figuring this whole thing out a day at a time. But if there’s anything I’ve learned so far, it’s that there are worse things than being called a “bug-eyed, squealing” enthusiast.

  I have been lucky enough to earn a living doing exactly what I love. I hope that, whatever it is that you love, you never let anyone make you feel weird about it. Don’t be afraid to put yourself out there, to write or sing or draw or play video games or dance like a crazy person in an Apple Store. Do what makes you happy.

  It’s always worked for me.

  And who knows? You might even build a career out of it.

  xoxo

  ij

  THE GOLDEN RULE

  THE DETAILS ARE FUZZY NOW, but I can tell you that I was in the sixth grade, I was sitting in home ec class, and for some reason our teacher had decided to rearrange our seats—I ended up in a chair next to Steve, the class troublemaker. I don’t know what started the fight. What I do know is that he kicked me. Hard. Under the desk. In the shin.

  With no mind for the potential consequences—prompted only by sheer outrage—I kicked him back. He kicked me again. I kicked back. This continued on a little longer than perhaps was necessary, but there we were, surreptitiously kicking each other under the table, trying to avoid the watchful eye of our teacher. (Eventually, she did notice, of course, and ended up rearranging the seats yet again—we were on the verge of disrupting the entire class now, and there was also a huge likelihood that, allowed to keep going like that, we would have wound up seriously injuring each other.)

  After school I was so upset about the fight that I immediately related the whole sordid story to my friend Natalie. As we sat at home, me rubbing my sore shin and Natalie listening to the gory details in wide-eyed disbelief, I suddenly had a wonderful idea. I fished out the school yearbook and flipped until I’d found Steve’s photo. I scanned and printed a copy of it, drew devil horns, an evil-looking mustache, and scribbles all over his face, and sat down in front of my computer. Back then I was still using trial versions of programs like Photoshop and Dreamweaver—it’s expensive software now, but it was exorbitantly priced then, so every thirty days I’d reformat my entire hard drive so I could re-up with the thirty-day trial. With my newly acquired coding skills—and the semi-pirated software—I set about creating what can only be described as a masterpiece: my very first website, about how much I disliked Steve (the actual name was “I Hate Steve,” much to my current chagrin). I was still seething, and building a website seemed like the only way to get back at him.

  Once I got over the initial flush of anger, though, something interesting happened: I was actually impressed—inspired, even—by what I had made. I had been teaching myself HTML for months—I had a TextEdit file filled with lines of code, which I’d copy and paste into some of those early web editors, experimenting on the basis of trial and error—but I’d never actually built an entire site before. As I marveled at my handiwork, I actually felt motivated. That initial hate-driven burst of inspiration turned out to be just what I had needed, and it paved the way for other early and—let’s just say it—amazing and tech-savvy sites: sites like IHateCows, in honor of the crazed heifers who frequently escaped from the neighbor’s field to chase my sisters and me while we stood outside waiting for the school bus.

  I grew up in a very small town in rural Pennsylvania, the kind of place where it was common to see someone riding a horse down the middle of the street, where goats and sheep and, yes, the occasional cow often wandered into my parents’ yard. Shouts of “Call the neighbors!” would ring out through the house, and my dad would end up chasing the animals back to their rightful owners with his tractor. (My father has always taken excellent care of his grass, and I’m convinced the area farm animals were working collaboratively to get out and get at it. I believe this strange sort of upbringing also explains my enduring love of camouflage clothing.)

  We did not live on a farm, per se, but we did raise chickens. It was generally my job, either as a chore or as an out-and-out punishment, to collect the eggs in the morning. If you’ve never collected chicken eggs before, a piece of advice: they’re usually nestled deep within steaming piles of sawdust, wood shavings, and chicken poo. You’ve got to get in there and really dig. Suffice it to say, collecting eggs in the morning was disgusting. On the plus side, however, our chickens were both tame and well trained. Once you stepped out of the house and into the backyard, they’d waddle right over and bow their heads, beckoning for you to pet them. They were a lot like dogs in that way. We had a dog, too—an actual one—but the chickens didn’t seem to know any better.

  Aside from the petting and the egg laying, our chickens were also often the stars of the earliest Ezarik home movies. With the boxy camcorder resting atop my shoulder, I’d put pieces of feed on the keys of a little toy piano and encourage the chickens to pluck out a tune. My sister’s pet guinea pig also featured prominently in some of these videos. (The poor thing ended up with a cancerous tumor the size of a tennis ball—but he was a trooper!) When I grew bored with my budding film career, I’d spend some time taking apart the VCR and trying, usually in vain, to put the thing back together again.

  My love of pigs started at an early age . . . a trip to the zoo with my dad (old-school VHS camera in hand!) and sister Breanne, circa 1988 in southwestern Pennsylvania.

  As is perhaps becoming obvious, I was kind of a weird kid.

  I just knew, as far back as I can remember, that I was different. Making friends was always a bit of a challenge. I liked trading Pog and baseball cards, but none of the other girls my age were into that sort of thing. In lieu of going out, I spent hours and hours with my butt wedged into a too-small, child-sized rocking chair in front of the television, playing Super Mario Bros. and chomping on homemade venison salami (made from the spoils of
my father’s frequent hunting expeditions), which I called, affectionately, “Nintendo snacks.” As with so many other shy, analytical, and tech-minded children, it’s probably not surprising, then, that I fell in love, immediately, with my family’s first home computer.

  Our 1986-era Macintosh Plus was actually a gift from my mother’s sister, Aunt Vicki. Between breeding sheepdogs and selling goat milk, my aunt had somehow managed to acquire a computer, teach herself how to use it, and hand it down to us within a remarkably short period of time. Vicki is the kind of wonderfully free spirit who can flit from odd job to odd job. She was always picking up to travel to some exotic destination, and I like to think I get some of my antiestablishment tendencies from her. It was Vicki who taught me a number of important life lessons, like “don’t open the floppy drive when this little light is on” and “don’t forget to save your game before shutting off the computer.”

  Though I have warm memories of printing out beautiful and elaborate banners celebrating just about anything I could think of to celebrate (using up reams and reams of that perforated, hole-punched paper in the process), of making elementary pixel art, and of teaching myself how to type, our Macintosh Plus was replaced pretty quickly by the much more advanced Apple Power Macintosh 6100/60. (A quick Google search tells me this model is currently selling for a scant hundred dollars on eBay.) You see, my Apple loyalty started early, for no reason other than the fact that my mother is a teacher, and grade schools back then seemed to be stocked almost exclusively with Apples—we bought this second computer with my mother’s educator discount.

  And therein lay the trouble: all of my friends—or at least my friends who had computers—had PCs. I didn’t get why I couldn’t use the same software or play the same games. At some point, several years later, I requested something called SoftWindows, which was supposed to emulate Windows for Mac, as my one and only birthday gift. Let me spare you the suspense by coming right out and saying: It did not work. At all. This ongoing problem with compatibility, however, would become a tidy little metaphor for my entire life.

  Things started to change a little with the introduction of our first dial-up Internet connection. Once the earsplitting sound of the modem subsided, I navigated right on over to—where else?—Nintendo.com. Let me tell you, this was a revelation. Here were cheat codes and chat rooms and features about my favorite games! I could read all about what was coming next without having to wait by the mailbox for the next issue of Nintendo Power to be delivered! For the mid-nineties, Nintendo had some pretty awesome and heavily trafficked online forums, too. I remember they were modeled in the shape of a little house; you could ride a virtual elevator up and down to different floors, or catch some rays at the virtual swimming pool. I vividly remember my mother encouraging me to play outside more, to get some fresh air.

  “But I’m outside right now, Mom!” I would tell her. “I’m in the swimming pool at Nintendo.com!”

  When I found the Internet, I realized I didn’t have to go anywhere to travel the world—I had everything I needed at my fingertips. I didn’t have to be Justine from the middle of nowhere—I could be whoever and whatever I wanted. I chatted with strangers and invented elaborate backstories far more interesting than my own, and started to feel, for the first time, like I was part of some kind of community. And then, when I started to run out of things to do on Nintendo.com, I discovered a little button that revealed the HTML source code that powered the site. A strange and blinding array of angle brackets, tags, and commands popped up on my screen. I didn’t know what it all meant, but I knew that somewhere in that tangle of words and numbers that looked like ancient hieroglyphs was the thing that made it all happen. I wanted to learn that language. I needed to understand how it all worked.

  I frequented free web-hosting sites like GeoCities and Tripod and Angelfire; I copied lines of code from Nintendo.com, plugged them in via TextEdit, and saw what happened. I wrote my own garbled lines of invented code; when they failed to produce glittering graphics or sleek animation, I started over and tried something else. I discovered how to make a GIF in Fireworks. I hoarded those free-trial CDs for AOL and Photoshop and Dreamweaver. I figured out how to reprogram Kid Works, an intro-to-animation suite, so that if I typed the word po the computer would read—aloud, in that sort of post-apocalyptic, inflectionless monotone—the word shit. I cackled at my own cleverness. I demonstrated, to my slightly suspicious (and profanity-opposed) parents, all the reasons why this was both brilliant and hilarious.

  I spent weeks typing out silly stories and creating accompanying animations, which I would unveil in elaborate show-and-tell format, as some kind of warped holiday entertainment. For Christmas, I asked only for RAM. I pushed both of those early computers to the limit of their capabilities; over time, I became my family’s resident tech expert. And eventually, whenever someone in the neighborhood needed a website or an animation or help with their email account, someone would say—casually, without reverence—Oh, Justine can do it. In a town where (and at a time when) lots of people didn’t even have web access, being able to actually build things on the Internet became a part of my identity, the thing that made me me.

  Somewhere in the middle of all that, though, somewhere between discovering Nintendo.com and learning the ins and outs of HTML and figuring out that GIF is really pronounced “jif” (with a soft j) and adopting the moniker iJustine, was Steve, and that first website I built out of anger.

  Steve never saw the site I created in his honor, but he would continue to be a pain in the ass throughout middle school and right on into high school. In ninth grade Spanish, he was once again moved to a nearby desk (because he’d been mercilessly teasing the girl who had been sitting in front of him). I held my breath and waited for him to say something awful to me, but he didn’t. It occurred to me that perhaps I didn’t need to hate him anymore. Perhaps he had matured a little. But before long the subject of dirt bikes came up, and he started rambling on and on about his irrational love for them.

  “Oh, you’re one of those people,” I said, coldly. “I don’t associate with people like that. You guys are always in trouble.”

  It was kind of a weird thing to say, and I didn’t really mean it. I think I was probably just jealous—my mother never let my sisters and me ride dirt bikes, or do anything all that adventurous, frankly, for fear that we’d get hurt. But I knew by the stricken look on his face that I had cut Steve to the core.

  A few years later, Steve’s younger brother, Eddie, began dating my little sister Breanne. (For the record: Bre denies that they ever actually dated, despite the fact that they went to prom together.) And though I didn’t find this out until much later, Steve spent the bulk of his junior year stranded at home because Eddie would take the truck they shared and drive it to my house to hang out with Bre. Can you imagine? Not being able to go anywhere because your younger brother, your flesh and blood, was hanging out at the Ezariks’? What a traitor.

  A few years after that, long after I had started to build a web-based following, I got a late-night (probably alcohol-induced) Facebook friend request from my old nemesis Steve. That led to a conversation about our string of fights and what I’d always assumed was a mutual hatred of each other. But whereas the sixth-grade incident had always been foremost in my mind, it was the dirt bike comment that had lodged in Steve’s memory. In fact, he’d been so insulted that he wrote a college paper about how mean I’d once been to him.

  I’m not kidding. You can read part of it on the next page.

  You might be pleased to know that Steve and I have since become good friends. He’s a proud member of the United States Navy, as well as the safety and explosives expert for Pennsylvania’s own Squatch Watch—a group of devoted Sasquatch hunters from our very own hometown. (Total members numbering four: me; my sisters, Breanne and Jenna; and Steve.) He’s been in a number of my videos over the years, and he’s an incredibly supportive friend, game for just about anything I can throw at him.

  I
was lucky: my “I Hate Steve” website went live in 1996, lasted about a day before I dismantled it, and was only ever viewed by two whole people—my friend Natalie and me. It’s true that Steve gave me the motivation I needed—I’ll always be thankful for that. But he also taught me, whether he intended to or not, one of the most important lessons of my life: be kind—even (perhaps especially) on the Internet.

  Besides, you just never know when you’re going to need a safety instructor for your Sasquatch-hunting squad.

  Steve Moyer

  Mr. Watkins

  College Composition

  5 April 2002

  This is How We Role, Fool

  _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

  Riding a dirtbike is great fun and I have had fun doing it for a couple years now. I never saw a down side to it until one day. That day was the day I told Justine that I am a rider. Sure, before this people had made comments about it, but nothing quite gripped me the way that Justine, among others, viewed me now. Due to the fact that I ride, people hate me.

  Let’s go back a ways. Justine and I have been best friends since as long as I can remember. We never fought, or argued, or even disagreed on anything, no matter what the subject. But that was all about to come to a very abrupt halt.

  The two of us were in Mr. Fields’ eighth period class talking. This is when it started. I don’t remember how I got started on the topic or why for that matter, but it forever changed the friendship between Justine and me. All I said was, “I can’t wait to get home, so I can ride.” Justine cast a quizzical glance in my direction. “Ride what?” she inquired. “My dirtbike,” I responded. This is when things took a turn for the worse. “Oh, you’re one of ‘them,’ ” Justine said as she looked in the other direction. With a puzzled look on my face I asked, “Jigga what?” As she turned back, she explained that some so-called “dirtballs” on her bus sit by her and dirtbikes are the only thing that they talk about. These people annoyed Justine to the point where she could not bring herself to associate with anyone like them. With that she walked away and out of my life for good.