hoosier11  

Neil Levy

Tuesday, Thursday 2:30 PM

Intro to Media

3/27/2008

As I slowly awoke from my deep night sleep, my mind started to race. The same few questions kept coming up in my head. Who am I? Where am I? What is my place in society? After a few minutes I found that I had no answers to these questions. I rolled out of bed, confused as to where I was, and who this kid was that was sleeping on the bed on top of me. On my night table I saw a small index card with a name on it. It read: Neil Levy.

After I read the note card, I started asking myself who Neil Levy was. All around the room were pictures and textbooks all that either had that name on it, or my face. I started to understand that I was in my own room and my name was in fact Neil Levy.  I sat down at a desk and came to the conclusion that I must find out more about the name. I gathered my thoughts and started to think about various ways for me to answer more of the questions that were coming to my mind. Then I opened up the laptop that was sitting in front of me and I hit the Internet explorer button. On the home page was a facebook profile titled: Neil Levy.

        I looked through all the different pictures of me with all of my friends and family.

Memories started to come back to me, but still I had no idea who all of these people were

in my pictures. Looking through the pictures made me both happy and more confused at the same time. It made me happy to see people who cared about me and people have experienced things with me. On the other hand, it made me feel even more confused about who I was and what my place was in life. Also, I had no memories of the people in the photos, which made me feel like there was no point to my life. If I had no memories of all my different experiences then I basically had to start from scratch. After going through the pictures my mind was still running with questions. Who are all of these people that I am supposedly friendly with? What are they going to think of me? What am I going to do if I can’t get my memory back? I was hoping that this facebook profile would open my mind up to all my past experiences but inside I knew that I had a long way to go.

        I continued to navigate through my facebook page and I saw that I was in a relationship with Alexa Grunfeld. I was both shocked and touched to see that I had someone that I cared intimately about. As I clicked on her name my mind started racing again. Who is this girl that I am in a relationship with? What are we going to do now that I forgot everything? How long has this been going on? How serious are we? Those are just a few of the questions that I had no answer to. I looked through her pictures and saw that we were in a lot of pictures together, dating all the way back to summer of 2005. At that moment I knew inside that this girl meant a lot more to me than just a friend. I started to read our conversations that we had and for the first time I felt a connection to someone. Even though I wasn’t with her or even talking to her, I still was able to feel a connection with her in my heart and my mind. I thought it was incredible that I was able to feel something like that even though we weren’t even near each other. I loved looking at our

conversations but I knew I still had a lot more to learn about myself. So I went back to

my home page and proceeded the page. I noticed that it had a few of my favorite movies and favorite bands up: Linkin Park, Three Days Grace, Godfather, Shooter, Superbad, Maroon 5, Entourage, Mets, Giants, Chris Daughtry, Goodfellas, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, etc. Under those, I saw all these conversations I was having with my friends from all over the country and I hoped that these people would understand if I told them that I had lost my memory. I had only spent a few minutes looking through my profile and I had already learned so much about my past. My interests and hobbies were also on the site. Under the interest column there was a link for

www.blogtalkradio.com/hoosier11.

        I felt like I had already learned so much about myself and whom I am friendly with, but I soon realized that was only the tip of iceberg. My girlfriend Alexa and I were in the

profile picture, which made me tingle inside. I continued to scroll down my profile page

and I saw many archived shows that I had done in the past. Most of the show titles had to

deal with sports, such as “Mets Hot Stove with Neil”, “Giants Corner with Nizzle”, and “Sports Talk Radio”. Not only was this website able to show me that I am extremely interested in sports, it showed me that I am not a shy person and that I don’t have trouble expressing my thoughts. I clicked the show titled “Giants Win it All” and soon I heard a voice that was unfamiliar to me. It turned out that the voice was my voice. I was talking about how the giants had just won the super bowl that past weekend. The excitement in my voice made me understand how passionately I cared about the G-Men. It made me feel really good seeing that I felt strongly about something that wasn’t as serious as the outside world. Listening to my show and hearing my voice praise the Giants as if they were Greek gods, helped me see a few valuable parts of my personality.

First, it showed me that I have the ability to have a passion for something. Whether it’s sports, family, or work, I am able to invest my feelings and emotion into a single category. The fact that sports were able to control my emotions and either make me feel sad or happy was mind boggling to me. How could something as insignificant as sports have such an effect on my life? At first one would think that having feelings invested in sports is pointless, but after hearing the passion in my voice on my blog talk radio show, I’ve learned that it’s a lot more than just a sports team. They make me feel happy, they make me feel sad, and they even make me angry. Without experiencing these feelings how would I be able to grow as a person and be successful at different stages in my life? These talk shows have also shown me that I’m able to be competitive and emotional about things that aren’t as important as my family or my future. At the end of the day sports really don’t mean anything. They are just a way to have fun and interact with people who have the same devotion as I do. I would only hope that I can have the same amount of dedication and rationale for other aspects of my life.

            As I continued my exploration of using the Internet, I decided the best way to broaden my search would be to use this tool bar on the top left hand of the screen; it was called Google search. First I typed in “Neil Levy” and nothing relevant to myself came up. Then I tried a less specific search for “Pascack Hills High School” (I saw that’s the high school I went to on facebook). On the second page, fourth link I saw “Pascack Hills Tennis Forum”. I remembered seeing pictures of me playing tennis with my family on my facebook pictures, so I decided to click on that link. The next thing I knew were posts from Neil Levy in 2006 regarding the state tennis championships. I had posted “You guys have no chance. We will dominate you guys; we’ve got the best singles in the county” in response to the other team talking smack. My first question that came to my mind was, “Was I really good at tennis?” I decided that it really shouldn’t matter how good I was because when I saw that post, I thought that it showed me another critical part of my personality. I don’t remember how the tournament ended, or even if we had a legitimate chance, but the fact that I was willing to stick up for my team and have the confidence in myself to respond to a competitor like that, proved to me that confidence is another crucial aspect of my character. I don’t know if confidence is a positive or negative characteristic in my life but at this point it doesn’t really matter.

             What really matter’s right now, is me finding out what people think of me, and I don’t know if the Internet can show that to me right now. I need to interact with my friends, family, girlfriend, and see how I am around them. Although the Internet has not enabled me to completely discover everything about myself, it has definitely set me off on the right path to find the type of person I truly am. I am anxious to get to know all of the people that I once knew, but I’m most excited to learn who I, Neil Levy, really am.