It Ain’t Easy Bein’ Meezy, or, YourSpace

I checked my inbox this morning and found this message: “New message from IT AINT Ez3y b3!N M33zy b@by on MySpace.” Translation: “It Ain’t Easy Bein’ Meezy [Me], Baby.” This is Buford Farrell’s user name on MySpace. In the 48 hours since I started writing this post, he has changed it to “TRYNA BE THIS GREAT IZ HARDER THAN IT LOOKS.” (I’m secretly proud and thrilled that he used the correct homonym of “than.”) Buford Farrell, or Newford to distinguish him from the first Buford from September, or Feral Buford, because he has the loudest, most grandiose presence in the entire school, is our first out gay male student – pretty impressive for the first year we’re open.

He was writing because I’d asked him if he wanted to see “BASH’d: A Gay Rap Opera” with me and another student – I’d emailed the playwrights begging for free tickets, and they happily agreed to shell out three of them. But he took so long to get back to me that the plan fizzled. “Let me know your schedule,” I’d written. “Well my weekends are just shoping partys n tha beach...that can all be canceled...” he wrote back breezily, a month later.

I continue to be puzzled by the things my students categorize as urgent or totally inconsequential. [Ed. Note: These are broad generalizations that do not include the kids who are Eerily On Top of Everything, even more than I am.] Urgent: text messages from people in the same building, or even across the room. Whatevs: homework. Urgent: whoever is about to enter the building during first period. Whatevs: free tickets to see plays with teachers. Urgent: what time the period ends. Whatevs: what time the period begins. Urgent: another brand-new pair of sneakers. Whatevs: lunch.

Also, what is UP with their MySpace pages? I don’t even like MySpace, but it’s one of the only ways I keep in touch with former students at my old school. Go to my page, and it’s simple, with a white background. Go to Shawnice’s page, and it’s animated, with blinking contrasting colors, logos repeated everywhere, huge illegible graphics and gigantic pictures of famous people, the visual equivalent of a Motley Crue concert, if Motley Crue were a bunch of rappers, and then the page starts PLAYING MUSIC! By ITSELF!

They never use their own names as their user names. They choose long-winded, quasi-hieroglyphic, terrifically complicated turns of phrase that obviously have 27 meanings other than what I can discern. Maybe this is what my grandmother feels like when I refer to “the Internet.”

A few samples of user names currently employed by teenagers I know:
-! C0ULD B UR @DD!CT!0N !F U W@NN@ G3T H00K3D 0N M3” [I Could Be Your Addiction If You Wanna Get Hooked On Me]
- Slap iiT iin Mii FaCe ShOve iiT Down Mii ThroaT =) [Ed. Note: The smiley face is what gets me here. Yes, by the way, it IS what you’re thinking. I’m fairly worried this particular kid is hustling on Christopher Street.]
- BOYS HAVE COOTIES [Ed. Note: Totally!]

To their credit, some of my kids choose more uplifting user names, such as:
- In Life Sometimes You Have to Encourage Yourself
- In the process of Creating My own World
- ShAnIeCe:KeEpInG tHe PeAcE iNcReAsInG tHe LoVe
- 100% African Queen
- ___.[H i S]t 0 R Y
- Desidero essere il vostro tutto is sooo in love wit life!
- Nimsay-Guilty by design..& so damn beautiful...

Clever, clever. We didn't even have the Internet when I was in high school. Or, it was so new that nothing was on it yet.