"A" story? that's a tough one. well, I discovered the Fray sometime in the last year and what a year it has been. Graduating from college was the most fun and the most stressful time in my life. It's strange having to start all over again after taking 4 years to figure it all out. Who will come with me on my new journey into the working world? What will happen to all of the dear friends that I met along the way? What indeed will happen to us?

Part of my story is about trying your best to prepare, which seems futile since I have no idea what to expect.

My story is also about rebirth. I don't think you need a plan to be reborn (or dear goodness, i certainly hope not, or else I am screwed!! :^) Rebirth of me as a person, rebirth of my daily life, rebirth of my soul almost.

And so, I would like to wishthe Fray a happy birthday and only the best for the future. For those of you out there (like the one or two people who will actually read this), remind yourselves that every day should contain a little bit of renewal.

Tiger {curro@auragen.com}

no title

The last year has been one ride up for me. Getting a job in a high profile multimedia company, gave me a good idea of what life in the real world seems like. Thanks to Aage who got me the job - thanks for giving a media and communication graduate the chance!

I wouldn't be writing this otherwise. The reason:

I found fray through a co-worker of mine in january this year, and I've been inside each week to read and enjoy it over and over.

and so? don't we all?

well

My little private project is to write a book about communities like fray, how people get to know eachother in such spheres. Well I've started, and it's going somewhere...

I'll be back each week, you don't know me, and I don't know you - in real life - here in hyperspace we do!

Happy Bday Fray from Norway

Andreas {andreas@mediascience.no}

There has been a general lifting of spirits in Portland, Oregon since the beginning of this last year.

My first post-college job is getting slowly old, but while it has not been a perfect position, I have learned countless new things.

I climbed a mountain.

I recently began picking up leaves. Just five of them, but all distinct and perfect.

{fray} has been an inspiration, mostly because it really is a pile of people. A wide river of experience.

Thanks for bringing them to us, Derek.

Happy birthday!

Jeremy {jeremy@haub.net}

Happy Birthday Fray, and many more.

In the last year, I got tested a lot, and passed. I published, worked, learned and was fortunate enough to be surrounded by amazing and brilliant minds. I made electronic connections real, and they were better than anyone could have hoped. I got that much closer to being who I wanted to be and I was granted the privelege of watching some people I care deeply for grow and love. I have no complaints.

leslie harpold {leslie@smug.com}

Happy Birthday to you! Happy Birthday dear Fray!

When you turned one I was losing the love of my life. I was leaving him before he left me. So one year later, I'm still dealing with his absense but I'm doing it with more style.

I work in an enormous networking company and play with my friends from high school and a very select few from college. I date occasionally, but there really isn't anything to write home about. You know? I remind myself on a daily basis that I should not burn bridges; that exerting the effort to maintain or regain a friendship is worthwhile if I can touch just one person.

With that in mind, I concentrate on work and continue a whirlwind friendship with my ex. Is it worth the pain? When we share the intimacy of years of love and laughter . . . yes, definately!

Happy Birthday Fray! Your stories have helped me through some rough spots, reminding me that no matter how different and isolated I feel, somewhere someone is experiencing exactly the same thing. The more different we all are. . . the more we are all the same.

So, here's to one more year of making new friends but keeping the old.

T {t4tessa@hotmail.com}

HAppy b-day.

this is from the last few days of my life.... The whole world is going crazy. I can't ride the subway, can't walk out of my apartment without experiencing some new kind of horror each day. I can't fathom the people around me, can't understand them. What the hell are you thinking, putting a big sticker across the windshield of your Lincoln Luxury Sports Coupe that says LUXURY SPORTS COUPE? There's some point to that? That announcement is somehow necessary and beneficial? I saw thirteen Central American people get out of one station wagon in the Bronx last night. Two infants, 5 or six kids and the rest were adults. Are you out of your mind? You don't DO that. THAT is DUMB.

I went to the Queens Central Library the other day In Jamaica. There were no less than 5 security guards evident there. 5. Is there some sort of high finance going on at the book borrowing place? No. They are there in case of "trouble", in case "something goes down". At the LIBRARY.

I had lunch in Flushing, which is like some sort of little Korea in the midst of Queens, and I just stared at some Asian guy selling tofu in little cups and plastic bags. He has a little stand with a big vat of tofu and every time I go there he is in the same spot, smiling and scooping out tofu. Care for a tofu cone? You want sprinkles on that? I could just picture him in some freaked-out apartment making huge batches of tofu with his toothless mother cackling and stirring the vat. Then some woman walks up to me and says "What time now?" What time now??? Time now 1:30. Bye Bye.

We always eat at Szechuan Capital if we go to Flushing. They have fantastic food and great prices. Ed always gets basically the same thing: Two steamed vegetable buns, seaweed soup and scallion cakes (He's a vegetarian, but not for any other reason than he used to be a great big fat person ((220 lbs.)) and he went down to 165 lbs. when he stopped eating meat.) We usually have the same waitress, a chinese lady who looks to be in her late 30's. I wonder if she is really IN THERE. We go fairly often. We are usually the only white people in there. We order the same food, but I don't think she has any idea. Every time he orders those friggin buns she says the same thing. "Vegetable bun very big" and she makes this little gesture with her hands indicating the size. I mimicked her perfectly at the exact same time she was doing the gesture and her little speech about the size and she laughed. Thing is, we go in there next week and I bet she's going to do the same thing. We leave no impression. Too many faces.

I remember one time I stopped in to this little printing place where a friend of mine was working, just a little storefront printing press. It was Friday and I was wearing a suit. The lady behind the counter said he was off today. I asked her to tell him "ray stopped by to say hello". She said she wouldn't see him until Tuesday and may forget to tell him. I thought a second, and then did a handstand in front of the counter and held it for a few seconds. Then I asked her if she would remember now. I saw him a month later. She did. The bun lady is in for something soon, maybe I'll bring a sign with me that says "VEGETABLE BUN VERY BIG" and hold it up when Ed orders.

My friend Brian, who drives bent forward against the steering wheel "to be closer to the action", accidentally ran over a huge raccoon last night on Gun Hill Rd. in the Bronx. I looked out the back window and could see it violently writhing on the ground with its legs shuddering in the air. On the hood of his car, a duster, it says 3.0 V6 OHC. (He didn't put it there, it came that way).

I saw this middle eastern guy on Park Ave. and he had on those awful, awful sunglasses with the gold-like plastic on the sides. I love those things, they are as good as having a t shirt on that says AVOID ME, I AM OBVIOUSLY A BUFFOON. STAY CLEAR.

I went out on the Upper East Side last night. A totally different kind of horror. Cheeseballs. Slacks. Plaid. Brown shoes. Beautiful idiots and people that could buy and sell me. I'm sitting in a bar, surrounded by my peers who are smarter, more successful and better dressed than I will ever be, thinking "these people are so fucking stupid." "You must have agonized over which button up shirt will match with those khakis" $4 for a pint of Bud Light. Are you out of your minds? The "acoustic" band looked like a bunch a CPA's singing about coping with hair loss.

I was looking at this guy at the bar in front of me whom I had noticed because his laugh seemed sort of strained and loud. He was wearing brown shorts, a button up shirt unbuttoned about 3 buttons down, a thick gold chain, an expensive looking watch, a cell phone clipped to his pocket and tan socks with some kind of wacked-out sandal-type shoes. He had muscular legs which I think accounted for this wearing the shorts and he had a tan. His hair was parted in the middle, a little thick (almost bushy) on top and feathered back, halfway on the ears. Just like I got it caught in elementary school. He was kind of nodding his head to the music to this horrible music and I think it was more for show than for enjoyment, like "look at me , I'm grooving". I was watching him (I realize that sounds frightening) and I was looking for a wedding ring which I didn't see and I remember thinking to myself "So that's what it's like to be 34 and single on the Upper East Side."

I know that the downtown scene which I prefer is just a different version of the same bullshit. Tattoos and piercings and I'm so god damn unique and artistic and it's not about money can I borrow $10. I went to the warped tour at Randall's island to see this band I really like (the Deftones).Ed stopped at one point as we were walking around, looked at me and said "I see a lot of people who are going to regret their bodies in twenty years." I remember thinking to myself, this is the youth, this is our army, navy, air force, marines. An army of retards.

I keep wondering what the hell is going on, and why isn't anybody realizing it. People are becoming more and more fucked up. That's about the size of it. I am too, I am sure. It's this living on top of one another that's doing it. Piling people on top of people and all our humanity is being squished out. We aren't made to live like this, this never-ending migration to cities and the urbanizing of the suburbs and the suburbanizing of rural areas.

I imagine people have been saying the same thing as this forever, that it's all wrong, that we can't continue like this, yet we do. Will it last forever? Will we figure out what to do about all that shit I hear about, over-population, shortages of natural resources, killer bees, starlings from England, nuclear power in the hands of religious zealots ? The number of unimaginable acts committed against or by children that indicate the level of our sense of humanity has sunk to. Those horrible sunglasses.

I can't see any other solution than some sort of evening out. Some sort of global, spiritual, economic and physical middle ground that will be reached, whether we want it or not. The whole world is gonna turn gray. I suppose that sounds simplistic. It should. The extremes keep getting further and further apart, and there ain't shit I can do to stop that, but the middle doesn't move. It's always gonna be right where it started. I can't conceptualize a new middle.

I don't think we are going to evolve into some non-violent, well-spoken, sensible-as-all-hell race of hard-bodies. Nor do I think that we'll spend our future in some sort of post-apocalypse anarchistic half-lit nether world. Ever. I just don't see that "enlightenment" dawning on us all, or even being forced on us. There are too many contradictions in that idea for it to be conceivable, the simplest being that a real UTOPIA couldn't be something forced. I found it very interesting that the only type of religious belief they wouldn't tolerate in that book "utopia" by whoever wrote it was no religion at all, atheism. Reason being was because an atheist would have no deterrent other than fear of punishment and his own sense of morality to keep him from breaking the law. No fear of holy retribution or vengeance.

True, maybe there is an understanding we will one day achieve that I could not possibly conceptualize, that will be so simple and so universal that it will be accepted immediately and wholeheartedly by all. Will that be God? I don't know.

I think things are going to continue as they are. The freaks will become more bizarre and incomprehensible. The boring will become more plain and indistinguishable. But I do think that the number of people that could be said to fall in the middle will grow. The mediums of communication are becoming more and more accessible to people. Cell phones, beepers, lap tops, internet, email, they are undeniably having an effect on people. I wouldn't say, though, that they are drawing mankind closer together. I think that they are providing forums within which people can become more aware of how other people live, how they think and act and what they are thinking about. But that awareness doesn't necessarily bring understanding and it doesn't necessarily bring them closer, either.

But it helps. The awareness that these relatively new tools and means of communicating have made possible is encouraging. But I don't think it will have much effect on those people you could say live on the edges. Nutballs, spanks, down-right weirdos. They aren't going to be brought back into the fold by interaction with the more even-keeled population. Somebody once said that a man shows his greatness, not by being at one extreme or another but by touching both at once. I agree with that. Someone also said "I don't care whether it's good or bad, as long as it's intense." I can see that in myself as well. I am making an effort, not to know everything, but just to get a good idea of how much is out there to know, and to know it a little. It sounds egoistic, but I really want to be a kind of renaissance man, a jack-of-all trades type guy. A little bit of everything. I want to be the middle. Right now, I can see myself as being more on the fringes. Let's face it, I'm practically a fucking freak. But I KNOW that, so I am one up on the rest of them.

ray abruzz {rabruzzi@trpublication.com}

happy birthday fray!

i can't believe its been another year of fray, my fray story was the first one of the second year!

in the last year, i lurked, a lot... ironically it seems that i had to quit doing a site about photography to become a photographer again. i finally have a darkroom and i have begun shooting my kind of photography again. strangely enough, the photography i am shooting now makes me want to share it again, only this time, the url will be obscura. (none of the good stuff is up yet, but check back, i am sure it will be)

i miss you guys :)

love,

m i c h a e l {michael@otherside.org}

The past year was a turbulent year, even for me. This time a year ago, I was involved with a man who was abusing me and desperately in love with a woman 1500 miles away from me.

Learning design, becoming indespensible at work, being left for an 18-year-old, going really, finally, completely crazy.

And then coming out the other side.

Somewhere between Iowa and Seattle, flying down the road with the girl I was in love with and so simply happy to be around, I went sane. I've remained happily so ever since. She's still 1500 miles away from me but now we know that whatever happens to the two of us, we'll always have what exists between us. As a year, it's been pretty good.

So happy birthday to both me and the Fray. May your third year and my twenty-fourth be filled with startling amounts of joy.

Kris Millering