Fabulously Permanent

Kids, listen up. When your teachers and parents tell you that everything you post on the Internet stays on the Internet, they speak the truth. Unfortunately, this also holds water if someone else posts about you. Of course, I have felt the same blasting force of this truly unfair rule from the day I joined the social networking world. In middle school, I, like any other wannabe facetiously cool tween, registered for Myspace and began my journey into the world of sharing photos, messages, and interests with friends. First and foremost, I had to design a flawless profile ten times cooler and more appealing than all of my friends’. I spent an average of three hours a day creating sparkly gifs that read “ShAy FuNg” and finding songs to accurately describe my distressed emotions of the “tough” times of middle school… I went with the inspirational “The World’s Greatest” by R. Kelly. The description in my profile read somewhat like so: “The name’s Shannon but you can call me Shay, Fungy, or Shah! (If you have any other nicknames just LMK!!!!!) I hate drama, love the movies, and think Nick Jonas is really really hawt! Callertext me!” Let us call that paraphrasing because I have mostly blocked that blimp in my life out of my memory; but, I do clearly remember that I absolutely HAD to have the coolest, “selfie” as my profile picture. So, naturally I took my super enviable LG Chocolate, popped open the camera, and had a ball taking mirror pictures of myself chucking up a peace sign and pouting my lips to make the perfect I’m-so-mysterious-and-moody face. Really cool, Shannon. Really cool. After two years I apparently lost interest in the world of narcissism and deleted my profile, thank a higher power. Recently, I thanked my younger self for holding the good sense to delete those dreadful documented moments until I stumbled upon an old album on my sister’s Facebook page. Stated simply, the album consists of about twenty-five percent of my old Myspace pictures ranging from bathroom self-portraits to bird’s-eye photos of a girl wearing too much eyeliner and even more sass. Just when I thought I had escaped my past, these pictures reappeared in my life, reminding me that I can never retrieve the information I once released on the Internet, especially because my sister apparently hates my existence and wants me to die a slow social death of humiliation. Sadly, my middle school misfortunes do not end there and posts get creatively more and more embarrassing. Among the seemingly greatest sabotages (according to the popularity of favorites and likes on social networks):

     -Fourteen-year-old Shannon Fung belts a rendition of “Fabulous” by High School Musical’s Ashley Tisdale. I really encourage everyone to look up the real video on YouTube in order to fully understand how the video of me trying to reenact this scene in my room looks. I wanted fabulous, but I did not want my attempts presented to the world before my official debut.

     -Shannon Fung straight out of wisdom tooth surgery photos. Truly, my friends bombarded me merely two hours following the extremely painful removal of my wisdom teeth and approached my swollen face with a camera phone. Boom. Up on Facebook they went. I applaud you if you find them, you will surely laugh at the fact that I look exactly like Glimmer from The Hunger Games after the vicious Tracker Jackers attack her face.

To me, the Internet holds the same powers that John Keats’ urn does in his poem “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” Like the immovable pictures on the urn, the photos and videos posted of me of various social networks will never come down. They remain permanently within the realm of the Internet world now, readily available to all who search hard enough for them. The pictures on the urn will always depict the couple as young lovers and the desolate town as sacrificial just as the Internet will forever show my embarrassing antics as a young teenager. While anyone can paint over the urn’s old pictures, they will always remain underneath it all; I can paint over the pictures of my past but even I will never forget what came first: a chubby idiot.   

Because I mean like, really cool picture, Shannon.