On July 18, 2001, our dearly outrageous and incomparably beautiful Rebel disappeared into unknown  parts on a camping trip.  Remember Gilligan’s Island?  Well, her foray turned into Rebel’s Wilderness:

I will spend the weekend with a bunch of recovering druggies… It is fun and Crazy and a little psychotic….

And weeks passed.  And months lapsed.  Then the change of a year.   Damn, Rebel, it’s cold out in those woods—get the hell out of there!  But snow crystals buried all vestige of life in the fateful forlorn forest with no sign or stirring of a return of our Rebel.

But you got to know that Rebel is a great artist and a truly original American.  She is.  So, naturally, I clung to the desperate hope that because her blog hadn’t disappeared, that someday, too, she’d return to reclaim it (after all, we all know that a Xanga blog is almost as precious as life itself, right?!)

So deluging the cosmos with my psychic goodwill, I left a last appeal to this crazy girl:

If you ever come back from this trip, I'll rub and lick your feet for a week!

And now she’s back! 

*licks*  *licks*  *licks*

'The first step is to find out what you love -- and don't be practical about it. The second step is to start doing what you love immediately, in any small way possible. I've seen what happens to people when they get to do what they love.  They light up. They glow. They have a kind of energy that's wonderful.'

Barbara Sher

Where's Xanga tonight?

I found Liz_A lamenting the changing face of Xanga here.  Here was my response to her.

There were 625 posts between about 9:30 and 10:30.  I recognized 6 of the bloggers.  The rest were mainly teenagers as you describe.  There appears to be a strong Hawaii contingent and a strong New York contingent.  But, indeed, the very youthful and (un)grammatically brazen are inundating Xanga.  In some ways, Bianca Broussard was a blessing--"she" recruited a *melting pot* cross-sectional variety of humanity and not just high school kids. 

At this rate, within a year, every kid in high school will have a Xanga account.  And those of us remaining here and not in high school? We be Xangarelics--(hey, I coined that term )  But when I did, I didn't realize how apropos it would so soon become!

hey, hi skul's koo, I just don wann go back
an, no, got nuthin gainst noone but squawking *first dates* *condoms* and *crushes* grows old for me fast   now second dates--ya wanna talk second dates?  great, let's just park it over here...

Like Liz_A, I tried to foray into the Random world of Xanga tonight and found Xanga H.S.  The Recently Updated: predominantly Xanga High.  The Newly Created: the future class of Xanga U.

Yet if only 1% of the high school contingent were as playfully expressive as someone like vickyvix, the experience of Random Xanga would be rewardingly rich.

What should really be interesting to watch is what  happens to Xanga H.S. come summer vacation.  Will Xanga remain for most of them something to do?  Or will only the losers live out vicariously through Xanga the lack of summer thrills?  But maybe, just maybe, Xanga will become their drumming forum for sorting out summer's sensualities...and lighting the night on fire.