I, Justine: An Analog Memoir

by Justine Ezarik

  BLOND (LACK OF) AMBITION

  WE WERE IN KINDERGARTEN, CELEBRATING some kind of early-childhood version of career day, and our teacher was going around the room, asking each student that age-old question: What do you want to be when you grow up? The answers, up to that point, had all been fairly typical: a firefighter, a cowboy, a princess, the president. When the teacher got to my friend CJ—whose mom was best friends with my mom (his family had three boys, mine had three girls; it was all very Brady Bunch)—he stood up and announced proudly that he wanted to be a cop. When the teacher got to me, I stood up and announced proudly: “I want to be a chef at Bob Evans.”

  There was a fair amount of subtle head shaking and a fleeting look of concern from the teacher. A chef at Bob Evans? That was . . . well, let’s just say it was a pretty random thing to want to be.

  It was an especially ironic answer because I cannot now, nor have I ever been able to, cook. (Did you forget about the part where I said I once made a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich in the blender?) In my defense, though, I had to say something. And I really liked the food at Bob Evans (it’s a chain of down-home, country-style restaurants, if you’re not familiar); we usually went there on Sundays after church. Mostly, I just didn’t have a better answer. Whenever anyone asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I usually froze. Or shrugged. Figuring out what I was going to do with my life—or worse, how I was going to make money at it—just wasn’t something I was ever thinking (or, evidently, worried) about.

  Here’s CJ, probably practicing some kind of police takedown maneuver on me.

  My lack of career ambition might have been fine if I had been a more conscientious student—but sometime in the middle of third grade, my mother discovered that I was basically BSing my way through school. We had these workbooks filled with simple exercises and wide-rule spaces for writing in the answers, and it was nothing more than a bunch of busywork. I’d been doing the work—I was perfectly caught up in all of my classes—it’s just that the handwriting I’d been employing was somewhere between out-and-out nonsense and a kind of invented shorthand. I mean, I could read back what I had written, sort of, so long as I squinted one eye closed and strained really hard. When my mother finally clamped her eyes on one of those scribble-filled workbooks, however, she decided it was probably time to go in and speak with my teacher.

  My teacher explained to my mother, delicately and slowly, that she thought the scribbles were perhaps all I was capable of, that they were representative of the best I could do.

  “THIS IS NOT THE BEST SHE CAN DO!” my mother practically screamed at her, waving the workbook around for emphasis. “She is pulling one over on you. Believe me, this is not her best work.”

  And to prove it, my mother carted that same workbook right back home and sat me down for what amounted to two or three hours a night, five or six days a week, until I had painstakingly rewritten what I had previously chicken-scratched my way through. We’re talking months and months of work here, the equivalent of an entire half year of school.

  Standardized testing did not go much better. Somewhere along the way, I determined that I was “great at guessing,” and usually Christmas-tree’d my way through all those Scantron answer sheets. It’s not that the lessons were ever over my head or that I couldn’t handle the workload, mind you; I just had difficulty paying attention (something I still struggle with). I’d get bored easily. To avoid fidgeting too much, I’d sometimes take apart my watch or my calculator and attempt to put it back together again. Looking back on it now, I think I had (have) a mild case of undiagnosed ADHD. At the time, though, all I knew was that I didn’t like school. What I liked were computers. So, from elementary on up, I did the bare minimum, studying just enough to get the grades that wouldn’t get me in trouble.

  Most of the time.

  My mother and I worked out a deal (and by “deal” I mean that she set the ground rules and I attempted to follow them): I had to maintain at least a B in each of my classes. Anything less than a B and I would be grounded—no computer, Nintendo, Super Nintendo, N64, Dreamcast, Game Boy, or Game Gear—for the remainder of that nine-week grading period. Never one to be deterred, however, I soon found a convenient way around that.

  My friend Zack had a little Sony VAIO laptop that he let me borrow when I explained to him one afternoon that I had been grounded—again. I hid this from my parents, of course, but as soon as my mom left the house to drive my sisters to gymnastics or softball or some other extracurricular activity, I’d pull it out and get online. For a while, I was able to get away with this. Unfortunately, we still had dial-up—so when my mom called the house one day, got a busy signal, and realized I was on the Internet (I certainly wasn’t talking on the phone—I hated talking on the phone, and she knew that), I wound up in more trouble than I’d been in in the first place.

  She wised up quickly. Not only did she make me return the laptop, she started taking the computer keyboard with her whenever she left the house. She just didn’t know that I had a spare keyboard (and a mouse) hidden upstairs in my room. I’d wait for her to leave, run downstairs and hook up my extra equipment, play around until I heard the sound of the garage door opening, and then I’d pack it all up and dash back to my room. That worked just fine for a while—until I got caught doing that, too.

  Now my parents were serious. They confiscated my spare keyboard and my spare mouse and bought a rolltop desk with a lock—whenever they weren’t using the 6100/60, they’d just close up the desk, shutting the computer out of sight. So, I did what anyone in my situation would do: I learned how to pick locks. I’d wait for them to leave, creep downstairs, pick the lock, and plug my mouse into the computer (because, of course, I had a backup to my backup). I used a built-in Mac app called Key Caps, which allowed me to type using only the mouse—no need for a keyboard—letter by agonizing letter. I’d click out my messages and then copy and paste the text into a chat room or on ICQ (my instant messaging app of choice) or just surf the web for a while.

  I guess what I’m saying here is, in addition to being a poor student, I was a bit of a troublemaker. And it only got worse with time. Because by high school, I had become an official member of the 1337 Crew.

  “Leetspeak,” or 1337speak, came out of 1980s hacker culture—it’s a kind of Internet language where letters are liberally replaced with numbers (the 1 replaces the L, the 3 replaces the e, and so on). “Leet,” meanwhile, comes from “elite,” as in an elite-level hacker or gamer. Which is exactly what my computer-loving friends and I were pretending to be. We each had our own top-secret Internet handles—mine was xthree—which we used to communicate, undercover-style, via something called IRC (short for Internet Relay Chat), which was an early text-based chat system, basically a precursor to both AOL Instant Messenger and texting as we now know it. There were different channels (or threads) you could join, each denoted by a hashtag; ours was something like #L33TCR3W. And yes, IRC is where the now-ubiquitous hashtag trend comes from.

  I chose the handle xthree (which I stuck with for years until eventually throwing it over in favor of iJustine—my xthree DeviantArt page is actually still active online) in part because it was gender neutral. At the time, most of the people I knew who were into tech, including the vast majority of the 1337 Crew, were boys. I was used to being “one of the guys.” Sometimes it just seemed easier not to draw attention to the fact that I was actually a girl. Using the handle xthree, I could play video games without being judged and without feeling guilty whenever I beat my friends with Y chromosomes.

  Plus, I liked being anonymous—on the Internet I was still pretending to be just about anyone other than Justine from the middle of nowhere. Most of the time, I was pretending to be Angelina Jolie in Hackers, fighting crime (and playing the occasional prank) with my blazing computer skills. The movie came out in 1995, when I was still in middle school, but it played a huge role in how my high school friends and I felt about ourselves. (The characters, after all, were high school
kids, too.) Being able to code and program made us feel like part of a special (ahem, elite) kind of club. Watching the movie only reinforced the idea that what we were doing, what we were able to do, wasn’t nerdy. It was cool.

  True, “xthree” may not be as badass an alias as “Acid Burn,” but as members of the 1337 Crew, we felt it was important to keep our identities hidden, since—just like Angelina Jolie and Jonny Lee Miller—we were doing all this highly secretive, illegal hacking stuff. (Note: we were not doing any illegal hacker stuff; we were playing video games.)

  We even had T-shirts, which we made in graphic design class.

  Did I mention that we were really, really cool?

  When we weren’t breaking into government databases (note: we did not break into any government databases) or uncovering dangerous plots to unleash destructive computer viruses on the world (note: we did not uncover any dangerous plots to unleash destructive computer viruses on the world; that is, in fact, the plot of Hackers), we were playing Unreal Tournament, Quake, or Counter-Strike during study hall, all of which had been covertly installed on the hidden directory of the school network by one of my classmates. (Everyone knew that by pressing Alt+Tab you could quickly switch between top-level windows, which we did whenever our teacher walked by, in the event that he might catch us playing.) When I wasn’t playing video games in study hall, I was taking naps under my desk—I actually had a little pillow and blanket that I’d carry around with me; I’d finish my work and then crawl under there. My friends were kind enough to hide me from the teacher. (Seriously, how did I make it through high school?) And when I wasn’t playing video games or napping, I was busy keeping up with my raging social life. You see, the 1337 Crew spent most of our free time at LAN parties.

  We’d show up at someone’s house with our massive CRT monitors and bulky CPUs and our equipment and our power cords, network them together, and play various FPS (first-person shooter) games—Quake III Arena, Unreal Tournament—or, sometimes, Snood. We’d blast metal bands like Slayer, System of a Down, and Fear Factory, with some occasional Creed thrown in the mix (don’t judge me). And while most of our peers were out drinking or (possibly) doing drugs, we were downing Mountain Dew and potato chips in order to stay up all night. Since I still had my Mac, one of my friends would usually let me play on his or her PC. But only after they had mercilessly teased me for a while, of course. I loved my Mac, but in the PC gaming world, having a Mac made me look like a n00b.

  As a treat, we’d sometimes head to our local cybercafe, which was housed in a renovated church. There was some kind of restaurant there, too—I distinctly remember food (in particular, grilled cheese, which I’d proceed to get all over my keyboard) and pastries. You could also shop for a variety of firearms. Basically, it was a combination restaurant/gun store/cybercafe, and the cybercafe was in the basement. (Only in Pennsylvania.)

  • • •

  What’s ironic about all this, and by “all this” I mean my lack of ambition and my fervent dislike of school, is that I had not only discovered what I was most passionate about in the world, I was already doing it. I had even been making money doing it. In lieu of getting an actual part-time job like most kids my age, I had been building simple websites for friends and neighbors (including Aunt Vicki, so she could sell her goat milk and sheepdogs online) for a couple of years. It just hadn’t occurred to me yet that I might be able to build a career out of this.

  It wasn’t until later in high school, after I’d joined the 1337 Crew and started taking every computer class available—Basic, Visual Basic, C++, three years of computer math, Java, etc.—that I thought maybe I had finally found a viable professional future: at some point, I started telling everyone that I was going to become a computer programmer. Never mind the fact that I cared much more about front-end design—the way my programs looked—than about, you know, actual programming.

  In the meantime, somewhere between attending LAN parties and taking computer classes and playing a whole lot of video games, I stumbled upon a second love: photography. I joined the yearbook staff, where it was my job both to take pictures and to lay out pages in Adobe InDesign. (This was also more or less the first time I’d ever worked with a digital camera; when I realized the thing could record mini-videos, I legit lost my mind.) It didn’t take long before I decided to merge those two loves: I started a website called Daily Random Photo, where I’d post a funny, silly, inexplicably weird, or crazy pic every afternoon, sometime after I got home from school. (In those days, you had to build everything manually—code each page individually, upload each individual photo to the server, create each individual archive page—so it was yet another time-consuming hobby.)

  I was lucky in that my friends were both supportive and interested in this new enterprise; Daily Random Photo became a kind of casual topic of conversation—What’s going to be on Justine’s website today?—among the people inside my group. Aside from my friends and acquaintances, though, I’d been spending loads of time on various Apple forums and Mac-enthusiast sites (especially spymac.com), searching for and chatting with people who loved Apple products as much as I did. My growing presence on those sites, it turns out, was further driving traffic to Daily Random Photo. The result was that I was averaging a couple hundred hits a day. Without even meaning to, I’d started creating content, building an audience, and harnessing the powers of social media. I didn’t realize it then, but I was getting closer to the thing that would one day become my job.

  With my growing love for tech and the responsibility of updating a daily website, it only made sense that I started saving money to purchase my very own computer. At the time, everyone else in high school was focused on buying a car, but I was so consumed by computers that when I turned sixteen I didn’t even bother getting my license. (My friends all had cars and were usually nice enough to drive me wherever I needed or wanted to go, which was usually to one of their homes to play video games, anyway.) I tucked away the meager amount of money I’d made building websites for friends and neighbors. I scrimped and saved and pinched every penny I made for months and months and months. I squirreled away every cent of Christmas and birthday money. Near the beginning of senior year, my parents chipped in a little to help close the gap. And by the end of summer, I was able to buy a Power Mac G4. I loved it so much that I insisted on lugging the heavy tower and the bulky monitor into town, to the portrait studio, so I could pose with it in my senior class photo.

  “Can’t you just take a normal picture?” my mom asked, frustrated and sweating under the weight of the computer. (I didn’t so much lug my computer to the portrait studio as ask my mom to lug it for me.)

  “Mom, this is normal!” I yelled back.

  I guess it only made sense that, a few months later, this girl who wore computer club T-shirts and took her senior photo with an elbow resting on a G4 monitor would be voted homecoming queen.

  I know, right? It sounds crazy. I was someone who acted silly and hyperactive to hide my shy, antisocial tendencies and insecurities. I certainly wasn’t a very popular person. I had no idea then (and still don’t really know now) what people in high school even thought of me. Looking back, though, I think that was a blessing—it meant I didn’t have to waste any time worrying about whether or not I was “cool.” I self-identified as a nerd, but I was actually proud of the things I liked and I was never afraid to make a fool of myself. That’s probably why I was generally friendly and approachable and talked to anyone and everyone in high school, not just my core friend group.

  The news was a welcome surprise, followed immediately by the crushing realization that it meant I would actually have to go to homecoming, not to mention wear a dress. (I skipped out on my junior prom, opting instead to attend a kind of “anti-prom” with computers. My friends and I called it the LAN-ti Prom.)

  I’d love to tell you a poignant and moving story now, about how going to the dance was a magical, romance-filled night, about how it brought me out of my shell, about how simila
r it was to that climactic scene from the hit movie She’s All That—I mean, everybody always says that high school is supposed to be the “time of your life,” and that homecoming and prom are events you’ll never forget, right? Here’s the thing about homecoming, though: I just can’t tell you anything else, because I just don’t remember. All I have left is that newspaper clipping. Oops.

  • • •

  As high school drew to a close, my parents remained concerned about my uncertain future. Subtle questions about what I wanted to be when I grew up had given way to not-so-subtle prodding on my mother’s part: “Justine, you’ve got to figure this out.” “Justine, you need to go to college.” “Justine, what are you going to do with your life?”

  By then, I knew programming was out, largely because Mr. Fields, my teacher in all those computer classes (the one who didn’t mind so much if I napped under the desk, so long as I got my work done first, who pretended he didn’t see us clicking Alt+Tab when we were pretending not to play Quake) had given me an important piece of advice. Maybe the best piece of advice I had ever received, up to that point.

  “Justine?” he’d said as he reviewed the recent work I’d completed for his class, a program I’d built from one of our workbook tutorials. “It looks really nice, but it really doesn’t work all that well.”

  What he was saying was that I might want to focus on design rather than programming and coding. He was pointing out that I probably spent so much time on front-end design, in fact, because that’s what I was really interested in. That’s what I really wanted to do. It was just one more thing about myself that hadn’t yet occurred to me: I could be a designer rather than a programmer.