alaskamiller:

The End of the 00s: Actualizing Myself In The Age Of The Overshare Internet, by Alaska Miller

In 2001 I was a nerdy 17 year old born as a foreigner and raised in Silicon Valley that left high school early. I didn’t go to prom. I never got laid. I had a 5,000/2,000 win/loss ratio in StarCraft.

It was around this time I got my first job in the Silicon Valley industry. I was a barista at Yahoo. It was the good ol’ days. When they built a brand spanking new campus in Sunnyvale and the espresso drinks were free. I noticed a lot of people walking around with HTML for Dummies books, I figured I should do that too. That changed my life.

In 2002, I attended UC Berkeley briefly for a semester before deciding I hated sitting in a classroom. For some reason in my time indoctrinated with public education I had figured college was just whatever I, as a progeny of the upper lower-income class, was meant to do. I moved back home and snuck in and out of Stanford classes to learn about such worldly things as typography, philosophy, and renaissance arts. I couldn’t believe this was what kids of the upper middle-income class did for four years.

During this time I entertained the fantasy of being some sort of Good Will Hunting scenario but the upper-level math and programming classes deterred me and I was always afraid of getting caught and getting lynched. For sneaking around their fancy-schmancy Ivy of the West. For hearing knowledge I didn’t pay for. For still being unsure of what I want to do with life. I was afraid one day they’ll find me. And make me choose.

In 2003, I enlisted in the United States Marine Corps. It was the most punk thing I can think of at the time in light of the fact that all my high school friends ended up going to Harvard and MIT. It was hard to explain this to my family and friends, particularly being in hippies-owned Northern California. One time I was trying to nail this rich girl that tagged along with us to see The Return of the King and I thought I could impress her. She wondered out loud if I was just poor and couldn’t afford college. I slapped her. I still did not get laid.

I went to boot camp right before Christmas. It was the worst Christmas of my life. I flew to San Diego and it starts raining. Plus being crammed with other kids from Bumfuck, Egpyt, and some gnarly country bumpkin strains of the flu quickly spread to almost everyone. Three other kids in our platoon got dropped because of getting sick and I didn’t want to get dropped so in my sick delirium I figured if I drank enough water I could flush the virus out. I just peed a lot. I even pissed my own pants once when I couldn’t ask for permission right to go to the head.

Unlike the pansy-ass Army, the Marines keep recruits on base during Christmas and we kept training. We did get some creature comforts. For one we got to make a 5 minute phone call home. The platoon marched, clumsily, to the phone banks and our drill instructor specifically said we can only call one person, our moms. I called my girlfriend at the time.

She picks up, was surprised as fuck all that I called her, asked if I got her letter, to which I replied no… But did you get all those letters I’ve been sending you every night? To wit, she says she’s busy and hung up on me. I was set up. I tried to call my mom but my time was up. Afterwards I realized she sent me back everything I gave her over the years, including Victoria’s Secret underwear. It’s amazing how a Dear John letter can feel like being run over by a John Deere when you’re undersexed and underaged.

Come Christmas time I had a fever of over 100, my face was flush red all the time, and I collapsed in the middle of our Christmas feast at the chow hall. I got called into the drill instructors’ hut and the head drill instructor told me I have to be dropped. I started crying. Just outright bawling. Some kid desperately wanting to pretend he’s a man standing in front of grown men, combat veterans, drill instructors, and just crying because I was too sick and everything about military training was too hard for me.

I went to the medical rehabilitation platoon with pneumonia, the Navy doctors said my lungs were half full of liquid, and it took me four months instead of three to graduate boot camp. I did not cry when given my Eagle, Globe, and Anchor. I did not cry when my friends died in war. I no longer cry.

In 2004, I was in Jacksonville, North Carolina. I lived in Camp Lejeune and I learned how to cut down trees in Southern summer weather, poke holes in the sandy dirt to look for tank mines, how to construct and deconstruct improvised explosive devices, and most importantly how to blow shit up in a professional manner. These all turned out to be useful skills that I took with me overseas.

In our downtime Marines would do either of two things: troll Yahoo chat rooms for tail or venture into the trailer parks masquerading as a town for the strip clubs. I rather liked the latter and once I bought myself a whore, it was $80, but we didn’t end up doing anything because I was a nerdy kid and I still wanted my girlfriend. At least I didn’t cry.

In 2005, I was in Korea. In a podunk sea-harbor town but the Marine base was up in the mountains. We cross-trained with the Korean Marines. They served mandatory two-year military service but being a Korean Marine required an extra commitment and thus they were the best of the best. To denote their specialness only the Korean Marines get name tags on their uniforms.

I noticed that the Koreans tend to be touchy-feely with each other a lot. Being that rest of us US Marines were homophobic kids we giggled a lot in their presence. In spite of that the Koreans were accommodating. They showed us judo and even let us use their empty riverbeds to test-train explosives. Our command flew in kilotons of explosives from Japan for us to play with. This is because Japan does not allow the US Marines to blow shit up in empty riverbeds.

One morning I got picked to be the A-driver (bitch seat) for the convoy (okay, it was one truck) to pick up said explosives in Osan. It was a big road trip in a 5-ton truck. On the way back we got lost and ended up driving around the downtown of a city with combustable explosives for half an hour. I’m both glad and sad I was not cause of an international incident.

In 2006, I came home to Cupertino after the military. Aimless and depressed. Living back home in the suburbs did not help. One day I decided to do something about it so I broke into one of the office buildings nearby and walked around the cubicle farm asking everyone for a job.

Eventually this really nice old lady looked at me, smiled, handed me a MacBook Pro, and a big zip file of HTML files to fix. I asked where I can do it at and she said just sit in her cube. At the end of the day I gave her back the files and didn’t ask her if I should come back next morning, I just kept showing up. I worked there for about a year and a half. Eventually she found me an empty cube to sit in.

In 2007, we all stood around a television rolled in from somewhere. Everyone gathered around—I’m too young to make this reference but here goes—like the Eisenhower fireside chats. Before we started bombing Pearl Harbor. Via the closed-circuit feed we watched our CEO take the stage to introduce the project we’ve been working on for months.

My boss had a notebook open on her lap continuously F5-ing the Yahoo stock page. Every 5 minutes she would yell out loud the climb in the stock price. Because I wasn’t an employee, I didn’t have stock but I screamed equally loud as everyone else. The world changed that day and I’m grateful to have witnessed it.

In 2008, halfway through the year I was enlightened to two facts in my life: that I can sit in a cube all my life and crawl into middle-manager in twenty years or I can create something valuable with my own two hands. A week later I quit Apple. A week later after that I was rejected from the Y Combinator seed-funding startup program—something I obsessively spent two years on.

Owen Thomas of Valleywag picked me to work as an intern on the site. This was my first taste of professional blogging. I had no understanding of how to write and no clue about journalism. Detractors would say that’s exactly what Valleywag is all about. In this time I met a lot of people in Silicon Valley and Los Angeles in the industry. Half of the people were older than me. Half of those half were rich from the original IPO scams. Half of those half weren’t dicks.

In my short capacity as a Valleywagger, I did the following: I broke into Facebook for their toga party, I broke into all the TechCrunch parties, I had to learn about Julia Allison. You get some good breaks, you get some bad breaks.

In 2009, I spent a lot of months working on my “startup.” This ended up nowhere. I lived for half a year in the suburbs. They built a Starbucks around the corner just in time. I would have gone crazy without that fake marble counter next to the espresso machine, seeing people working a dead-end minimum wage job was the only thing that motivated me to code and write.

Later into the year JetBlue came out with an experimental marketing promotion. For $599 flat you get a ticket to fly unlimited times to anywhere JetBlue flies. I pored over the fine print the first day the promotion was announced, hatched a plan, and called five of my friends. All five made the excuse that they have real jobs to tend to. I have never called them again for adventuring. I’ve also unfriended them.

I flew 84 flights in September to every airport that JetBlue services in the United States. There were 42 airports. Terminal 5 became my makeshift home, I would flip over the seats to make a bed to sleep in on the overnights where I would dream about orange handbags that need to be picked up. In Spanish. Along the way I meant to blog everything but the guy that asked to come along screwed me over on the website. I’ve been editing and re-editing the writing and thousands of pictures I’ve taken of the trip ever since.

I then tried my hand at blogging business news vis a vis reporting. It was a tough racket. I had help from the best of the best in the business, Nicholas Carlson, but in the end I had trouble hacking it. It gave me nightmares and angry anxiety attacks that left me sleeping in the bathroom because I would be dry-heaving in the middle of the night wondering how to keep up with the workflow of other tech news bloggers. In hindsight, worrying about technoanxiety in 2009 seems ludicrous compared to dying in a coal mine in 1809, but at the time I felt it was one and the same.

I had a minor nervous breakdown. I ran to Las Vegas where I holed myself up in a comped gigantic suite on top floor for a week. In that room I munched on pot candy, made good friends with J. Mason, and explored Las Vegas proper. It turns out my hometown wasn’t the only suburban wasteland in this country; frogs at the bottom of wells and all that. I wrote 10,000 words about the experience, about how my most important friend throughout this decade has been the Internet. It has given me work, it has given me pleasure, it has given me friends, it has given me access to everything anything I wanted. I’m still in the process of editing it. I plan to spam it everyday to Tao Lin until he agrees to help me publish it.

In 2010, I don’t expect any job inquiries based on the over-sharing in this article. I plan on going back to my “startup.” I also hope to have a better win/loss ratio in StarCraft 2.