Ryan Chang

The main function of LJ was to vent. More often that not, I think, I used it as a daily record of life–like a normal journal–except a normal journal doesn’t talk back to you. This is how most people used LJ. I imagined LJ as a huge room of adolescents standing or sitting far away from each other who desperately wanted to have someone to talk to but were too socially awkward.

We wanted to be Seth. He listened to Bright Eyes and Death Cab for Cutie and still dated the untouchable, intimidating girls at his high school. Those kinds who wouldn’t look at us boys with long hair and too-tight jeans, who didn’t play football, who would go ice-blocking or sit outside of Del Taco when there wasn’t anyone around to buy us booze.

I was 19 and tender. I’d just moved back to Orange County after a six-month stint in New York City, freshly broken up from my first girlfriend, who was six years older than me. We “clicked.” We could sit next to each other, mute and comfortable, for hours. We had amazing sex. But she had a career to start. I had freshmen orientation.

She was immersed in things I’d only heard of before, like Debutantes, season tickets to the Orange County Performing Arts Center, new Volvo sedans, Pescetarianism, Whole Foods, art show openings, family alumni in Ivy League universities, famous relatives who were active or once active in the art world…