Dopp Juice Archive

Last night, Ivan Zimmerman, a 21-year-old student at SFSU fell from the fourth floor of a dorm and died. I didn’t know him. As of now, it seems they haven’t yet established whether it was a suicide, accident, or result of a fight. Regardless, he’s gone. The week before finals, no less.I learned about this through an SFSU community on LiveJournal. The person who posted the article included a link to Ivan’s MySpace account. Interestingly, people are already leaving public goodbye comments to Ivan. They speak to him, not about him. They grieve in the presence of others, but they grieve directly to him. danah boyd wrote about this phenomenon also, recently. She’d noticed it on both MySpace and Friendster. It’s a poignant and strange occurance, and it doesn’t seem to be an isolated event. Online community accounts live on after sudden deaths. It may be a little creepy, but it seems to also help (at least initially) with the grieving process. With the tenacity online communities use to get and keep members, I wouldn’t be surprised if these accounts lived on for another fifty years. So strange…

• When dealing with new people, make a point to like them (or focus on what’s likeable about them), and treat them as though you’re already friends.
• In stores or on the street, never walk between a child and his or her parent.
• British, Irish, Scottish, and Australian accents will get you far in America.
• You can’t decide what will happen in your daily life or how it will affect you. But you can decide where you want it to happen, who you want to include in it, and how you want to approach it. And that makes all the difference in the world.
• This digital age means that nearly anything can be done for nearly free. That means you have far more opportunities to display your creativity and talent. It also means that other people are creating far more junk haphazardly, just because they can. So you have more competition, but don’t be discouraged–most of it falls flat on its face.
• Getting a degree is not about proving you’re intelligent, skilled, or educated. It’s about proving that you can wade through the workload equivalent of Hell and still be standing when you reach the other side. This is a very useful skill in the working world.

You know they never really owned you,you just carried them around.And then one day you put them down and found your hands were free.-Ani Difranco