by Mia Mercado
A Time Line of My Online Personas
2002: [email protected]
This ancient MSN-adjacent relic was my very first email address. I intended for “SprGrl” to stand for “Supergirl,” though it just as easily could have meant “Spear Girl” or “Spider-Girl” or “Spare Grill.” I had seen approximately zero Superman movies and wasn’t particularly interested in superheroes at the time or currently. However, The Princess Diaries soundtrack featured a song with the lyrics “I’m Supergirl / And I’m here to save the world / And I wanna know / Who’s gonna save me?” I also had exactly one shirt from Kohl’s with the Superman logo on it. So, when pressed to think of an email address, I was like, “Hmmm, yeah, that could work.” The “919” comes from my childhood address because I didn’t understand the concept of not revealing too much information to strangers.
The only people who knew that email address were my parents, with whom I lived and had no reason to email ever, and a handful of friends at school. My email correspondence with those friends, whose email addresses started with things like “snowgurl” and “sk8rchick,” was composed primarily of quotes we found on strangers’ LiveJournals, like “fLiRtInG iS mY AnTi-DrUg” and low-res gifs from FunnyJunk.com. We also sent each other a lot of Dollz.
If you had a dial-up connection and went to middle school in the early ’00s, you probably remember Dollz. Describing Dollz as merely digital Barbie dolls does them a disservice. Dollz were like if a Bratz doll and a paper doll met behind a dumpster after school and the Bratz doll was like, “Okay, I found out what ‘BJ’ stands for.” They were tiny, pixelated hot girls with simple looping graphics of twinkling stars or a marquee above their head blinking SHOPAHOLIC. On websites like Dollz Mania, you could create your own Doll, picking which pink mesh messenger cap and flared white pants went best together (none of them). You could also select from hundreds of premade Dollz, all with twelve-inch waists, perfectly round boobs, and thighs that had never and would never meet.
My female friends and I would spend our nights making collections of Dollz we thought looked like us as Charlie’s Angels, us in a girl band, us but goth, or, most often, us in our imagination. “I would totally wear those low-rise jeans and black, cropped halter top,” I’d think while picking popcorn out of my braces and wiping it on my Target clearance-rack shirt. The only objective in playing with Dollz was to make the hottest one and send it to your friends. There was no compliment quite like someone greeting you in first period, handing you a full piece of paper with one, nearly microscopic, fifty-pixel Doll printed on it, and saying, “I thought this looked like you.”
If my taste in Dollz was any indication, I believed hot girls had voluminous hair that was wider than their waist, eyes that took up 75 percent of their face, and the suggestion of a nose rather than a nose itself. None of the Dollz ever looked straight-on; they always had their head slightly turned because even digital women have a “good side.”
One day, in seventh grade, my friend Alyssa printed off an email chain between me, her, and our friend Sami. This was a normal occurrence as we’d spend free periods cutting out the Dollz we made the night before and taping them to our assignment notebooks, adorning one of our few pieces of property with these tiny digital girls. All was fine and good until a cool boy got ahold of the printed-off emails during indoor recess. I’ll call him Taylor because that was his name.
After paging through the printed emails of Dollz, Taylor laughed and asked, “Who’s ‘Sperm Girl’?” The other boys with names like Spencer or Brandon started laughing, too. At first, Alyssa, Sami, and I didn’t get it. While decidedly slutty and intentionally sexual, none of our Dollz looked particularly sperm-y. So, he asked again. “Who’s ‘Sperm Girl 919’?”
He was talking about my email address. To boys who thought the word “sperm” was both a setup and a punch line, my vowel-less allusion was lost on them. Also, it would have been equally embarrassing to correct them by saying, “It’s supposed to mean ‘Supergirl,’ and you will address me as such.”
The boys called me “Sperm Girl” for the next couple of weeks. Despite my begging, my dad wouldn’t let me change my email address since I had just gotten that one. (Email addresses strangely felt like a finite resource in 2002.) I stayed “Sperm Girl 919” until high school, when I adopted an even more humiliating email address.
2003: GummiBGirl
In middle school, my classmates started using AOL Instant Messenger or, as we abbreviated it, AIM. I’m not sure how I convinced my parents to let me download the messaging program when they were cautious of me googling anything that could be remotely construed as salacious. (“What do you mean you need to look up ‘Venus’? Is that code for something?!?”) But somehow I did and was left with yet another opportunity to absolutely own myself with a terribly named online persona.
The screen name I chose was “GummiBGirl.” While there are a handful of ways to misinterpret that jumble of letters and what the “b” might stand for, I knew it couldn’t be read as “sperm.” This was really my only screen name stipulation.
The “b” stood for “bear” because “Gummi Bear Girl” was already taken. I enjoy gummi bears, but I wouldn’t say they’ve ever been integral to who I am as a person either in real life or online. They’re not even in my top three favorite candies. (It goes: Kit Kats, Peanut Butter M&Ms, Twix. Then there’s a gap, and then Life Savers Gummies, and then there’s another gap, and then it’s maybe gummi bears.)
The formula for creating screen names in middle and high school was simple:
Pick an animal, a dessert, a season, or a sport.
Add the word “girl” or some variation of it (e.g., gurl, grl, girlie, chica, chick).
Optional: add some numbers by smashing your face on the top row of the keyboard or typing whatever year you were born.
Make sure the name doesn’t unintentionally look like the word “sperm,” “sex,” “penis,” “poop,” or “vagina.”
I remained GummiBGirl on AIM until I thought of something “better.”
September 2004: ThInKiNpInK642
I eventually upgraded to the screen name I would have throughout all of high school: ThInKiNpInK642. It was random! It was obscure! It meant absolutely nothing at all! For those reasons, my teenage self thought, “Yes. That name is much better.”
“642” are the numbers you’d press on a phone keypad to spell out “Mia.” I’m sure I added them in hopes someone, anyone, would ask why I chose those particular numbers, but this is the first time I’ve ever explained it.
To dissect “Think in Pink,” here’s what you need to know. (1) I had a Pink Panther–themed pajama set that I loved. (2) This was shortly before “Check on It” by Beyoncé came out and was featured on the 2006 Pink Panther soundtrack, reaffirming my screen name choice. And that’s all the background I have for you.
ThInKiNpInK642 saw me through a lot: my first boyfriend,* that boyfriend breaking up with me a couple of months later, hours of online flirting with upperclassmen who would never look at me in real life, and another boyfriend,* who I learned wanted to dump me after he changed his standard Away Message from “I LUV MIA” to “AMBER K. IS MY BEST FRIEND.”
October 2004: seXxxiiGurL69
This was still during the Think in Pink era, and I’m not sure whether this is an exact screen name I used, but I definitely created accounts with something similar to it. This was my teenage equivalent to a burner phone. While playing online Pictionary or games like it, I’d be prompted to make up a username that would be displayed to other players. This was before I had Facebook, so I didn’t have to worry about the name somehow linking to a social media account, exposing my horny alter ego. Depending on my mood and whether my parents had gone to bed, I’d type in a name my teenybopper brain believed conveyed some degree of sexual appeal.
The formula for creating horny screen names was simple:
Pick a horny word (e.g., sexy, hot, baby) or some variation of it (e.g., sexi, ho
ttie, babii).
Add a Hot Girl name (e.g., Vicky, Victoria, Vickie) OR a variation of the word “girl” (e.g., gurl, grl, girlie, chica, chick).
Optional: add Xs or 69 for good measure.
Make sure the name doesn’t unintentionally look like the word “sperm,” “penis,” “poop,” or “vagina.”
In the middle of a Pictionary round, I’d privately message the other members of my chat or, more often, wait until someone messaged me something clever and subtle like “a/s/l” (shorthand for “age/sex/location”). I’d lie and say “24/f/nyc” or “18/f/chicago.” I was a fourteen-year-old girl in a Wisconsin suburb until I had the shield of the internet. Then I was a twentysomething college student in a major city with the same proportions as the Dollz I made online. Most of the time, the conversations were limited to normal small talk or commentary on the game we were playing. Occasionally, things would escalate.
They’d say something flirtatious like “i bet ur really hot,” and I’d respond equally flirtatiously like, “i am.” Sometimes they’d ask me to send a picture and I’d search “pretty girl blonde” and send along a pixelated Google image of whatever pretty, blonde, white stranger I felt like being that night.
There was only one time, in the entirety of my AIM life, I came close to having cybersex with someone. It was in the messages of one of these games. Things started off slowly, each of us asking the obligatory “a/s/l” and the other responding “nice.” Then one of us asked the other what they were wearing, I don’t remember who. The answer was probably “pajamas;)” to which the natural reply would have been “sounds sexy.”
If you’re familiar with phone sex or sexting, which I’m sure you are, you perv, you know how these conversations sometimes go. There’s buildup. There’s teasing. There’s something said that could be read as provocative, left dangling in the conversation like a ripe peach. If/when the other person takes a bite, it’s go time. That is not how this conversation went.
Shortly after “pajamas;)” one of us said, “Wanna cyber?” and the other said, “Sure.” That was it. There was no flirting with double entendres or flirting in general. One person was like, “Should we do sex now?” and the other said, “Okay, yes, I know how to do that.” Then there was silence.
“You go first,” they said after a pause. To which I flirted back, “No, you go first.” This continued for maybe a minute, with more long pauses in between. Then, without warning, they signed off.
I like to imagine that, on the other side of the screen, it was another fourteen-year-old girl in the suburban Midwest. I assume that she, like me, was many years away from anyone other than her family practitioner ever seeing her naked. I imagine this in part because any alternative would be gross and probably illegal. I also think, if she was anything like me, she would have understood the rush of embarrassment, excitement, fear, horniness, and shame I felt after I also signed off.
December 2004: PerfectAsImEverGonnaBe
This was the name of the first blog I had in high school. It still lives on the internet if you really want to go down a rabbit hole. However, there’s only one entry because I either forgot my log-in information promptly after signing out the first time or I wanted to change the URL from “gonna” to “gunna,” or maybe it was both.
In the annals of iconic first lines, among “Call me Ishmael” and “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,” there will be this, the first line from my first blog post: “So I’ve finally started one of these . . .”
The post goes on to include such poetic lines as “Jesse McCartney is dreamy:)” and such thoughtful self-reflections as “I say Like too much.” It ends with this devastating line: “Ugh I love how just as I have to go I know what I want to write . . .” Much like my first and only post, this blog doesn’t deserve much attention.
2005: Don’t Rain on My P.a.R.a.D.e
This was the name of the second blog I had in high school. I don’t remember if “Don’t Rain on My Parade” was part of the URL or just the title at the top of the blog, but both are equally bad. My blog was essentially a public, online diary, where I talked about my day with the hyperbolic drama you’d expect of a high schooler. I used code names for boys I had crushes on. I complained about teachers having the absolute nerve to assign homework. I typed in bad fonts and lots of colors and employed the use of bold type often.
I remember my blog being well-read among my classmates, though I’m not sure if that was the actual case or just what I imagined to be true. I know on a few occasions, people at school would comment about one of my posts. There is nothing like the sweet awkwardness of someone looking you in your real-life eyes and saying, “I liked that thing you did on the internet.” It was nice to feel good at something, being that I was a teen girl who simultaneously felt bad and perfect and too seen and completely invisible. It was nice to have an audience for the same reason.
Once, a boy anonymously confessed his love for me in the comments section of my blog. The idea of someone leaving me a secret love note was one of the reasons (subconscious or not) I started a blog in the first place. Unfortunately, nothing happened. I found out who it was and was disappointed that it was just a guy I did theater with and not, I don’t know, Jesse McCartney, lurking on my blog.
In a fit of needing to start fresh, I deleted the whole blog after high school graduation. Sometimes I wish I had kept more remnants of my high school musings. Most times, I’m humiliated when I remember anything from that era of my life. All of the time, I am grateful that social media and YouTube didn’t fully exist until I was out of high school. I would have been a total and complete menace.
2006: CiaoBella0906
This is the beginning of the email address that usurped “SprGrl919.” (Sperm Girl is dead. Long live Sperm Girl.) I had this email throughout most of high school, until I started applying for colleges and internships. I eventually became aware enough to know that future employers would take one look at my email and go, “Yeah, no. We’re not going to hire this Limited Too shirt that came to life.”
When I still remembered the log-in information, I went through my old inbox to see if there was anything worth salvaging. (Read: love notes I’d forgotten about.) Though the inbox was mostly spam and email chain letters from distant aunts, the drafts folder was a nasty little gold mine.
One draft was an email I intended to send myself, the contents of which were for a school project. The email had no subject line and was completely blank save for a PowerPoint presentation on the Holocaust and my personalized email signature that read *HoLLa BaCk*. My fifteen-year-old self in a tacky, tacky nutshell.
What else did I think was worth saving in an email draft when I was in high school? Why, the AIM conversation in which my middle school boyfriend and I broke up, of course! Cool! Super healthy and good! Here is an excerpt from that conversation, a two-line play, if you will:
ME: how come u refuse to do anything with me?
HIM: cuz u cant handle not being able to see me
Most of my drafts were saved AIM conversations, angsty and confusingly sexual poems I found online, lyrics to songs I made up, lyrics to songs Nelly made up, and a lot of rAnDoM cApItaLiZaTiOn.
Because I’m sure you were wondering, “0906” is my birthday, September 6. Mark it on your calendars. Send me gifts and lyrics to Nelly songs.
2008: Mia Mercado
I am among a generation of young adults whose relationship with internet privacy has changed completely. It started with parents and teachers screaming at us to never publish any remotely revealing personal information online and has evolved into those same parents and teachers adding us on Facebook. Recently, my dad endorsed me for “creative writing” on the LinkedIn profile I forget is still active. This is the same dad who was wary of giving our Wi-Fi password to any friends who came over to study in high school.
The idea of “cultivating a personal brand” online is so gross and strange, but it’s what’s expected. If you don’t have
social media accounts, you’re either a creep, a recluse, or too famous to care. Even Oprah has Instagram. Oprah! If even Oprah can’t ignore the pressure to present herself on the internet, how am I supposed to?
Maybe, one day, I’ll figure out how to care less about Twitter. Maybe, eventually, I won’t take it personally when a piece I write gets less Facebook attention than someone sharing a picture of a tree with the caption “Nature, am I right?” Who knows. Maybe I’ll just rebrand as GummiBGirl.
You’re from the Midwest?! What’s That Like?
When people are surprised I’m from the Midwest, I take it as a compliment. In part because I know that’s how they mean it. They’re not called “fly-over states” because people really want to “fly over there to South Dakota, dontcha know.” Though I’m sure Midwestern optimism would try to skew it that way. There are a lot of things about being born and raised and continuing to live in the Midwest as an adult that are strange and specific to the middle of the country. Things like how I personally knew the only other Asian family in my hometown. Like how my high school class could be divided into whose family was Catholic, whose was Lutheran, and the remainder would be maybe two kids. The fact that young people who aren’t millionaires or related to Kardashians can buy a house.
I know the Midwest can seem cultureless or uncouth or so cheap and convenient it’s suspicious, and you know what? Sometimes it’s all of those things. But I don’t think that’s necessarily limited to any one part of the country. The cultureless and uncouth parts, at least. I’ll pour one of my $2 beers out in honor of your coastal rent costs.
New York can smell like dumpster piss, and LA can feel like straightener-fried extensions, but we’ll all still tune in to watch a group of mostly white friends navigate those big cities at 8/7 central. I’m starting to wonder if maybe we only culturally care about the things we do because we’re told to and shown how. The Midwest can be overly polite, mayo-based, stupidly affordable trash, and I’m starting to realize I love it.