the Candy phase:

Characteristics include......

-Going to your first few parties, dropping, and immediately start telling all your non-raving friends how cool raving is.

-Being proud of the fact that you wear candy bracelets in public as to let everybody know how "underground" you are.

-Spending $150 on some phat pants that everyone in your family immediately laughs at but it doesn't bother you because they're "out of touch with the scene"

-Referring to raves as "parties" cause that's the only parties you go to nowadays anyways.

-Dissing all other forms of music as crap because they're not electronic.

-Thinking that wearing a soother DOES make a lot of sense and looks kinda cool.

-Not realizing that you're loosing your short-term memory.

-Incessantly dissing the "mainstream"

-Bar stars become your mortal eneamy, because they're "mainstream" partiers.

-Collecting flyers and wondering where you can get old flyers from b4 you started raving.

-Trying to hang out with djs and promoters to seem more in the 'scene'.

-Trying to explain to your non-raving friends (by now there probably aren't that many) the subtle nuances between tech-trancey house with a minimalistic edge and minimal hard tech with a slight trancey overtone and actually being serious about it.

-wearing candy up to your fuckin' elbows

-you know everything there is to know about e, and you're constantly telling everyone why they should do it as opposed to drinking.

-you still live with your parents.

-you carry vicks around with you 'for emergencies'

The Hard-core stage

Characteristics include......

-you now have almost no friends that don't go to raves.

-you switch over from wearing phat pants to jeans

-you have ove 40gigs of electronic music on your computer

-you have tried almost all the drugs known to mankind

-you start to hang around more with the 'older' (20+) crowd that smokes weed and bitches about how the candykids are ruining the scene

-you get yourself some turntables, and 10 old records and start calling yourself a dj.

-you think that anybody who hasn't heard the latest record that came out on a tiny independant label isn't a real raver, and who are they kidding? they're just there for the e

- you start giving candykids peanut butter as a joke

-you start talking about how good it used to be "back in the day" (2 years ago)

-when you meet somebody, the first question that used to be "soooo........ did you drop allready?" becomes "so.... how long have you been going to raves?" as to assert that you've been going longer than they have, thereby asserting your superior 'raveness'

The 'old schooler' stage

-you realize with a shock, that everybody you now meet started raving after you

-sweaty kids that want a hug first amuse you, and then you start hating them with a passion.

-you listen to dnb, breaks, house, tech, electro..... pretty much everything except trance, which you can't stand anymore.

- you realize that the kids that are now going to parties were in grade 4 when you started going.

-everybody keeps on saying 'wow, i haven't seen you in such a long time!'

-you skip a few parties and don't even care

-you haven't dropped in 2 years, and don't care.

-you have a real job

-you have your short-term memory back, and you like it that way.

-you see kids that you used to teach swimming lessons to at raves (ok, this one is just for me, but it was quite a shock)

-16 year olds come up to you and tell you that it's so great to see older people like you at raves (you're 24)

-people automatically assume that you can get drugs for dirt cheap (which you could if you wanted to, but you don't anymore)

-you start taking pictures of kids that are rushing, so you can laugh at them later.

-you are now the "old skooler that's so jaded and negative, he/she should do e" that you used to talk about.

-and you hate ppl that say that

-you decide that since you have to work the next day, you're leaving at 3am even though the party is going to 7am. Hell, you might even just skip the rave.

-you cringe every time somebody pulls out a picture of you in your 'candy raver' days

-you have more friends that don't go to raves then that do.

-you can't remeber the last time you tried to convince somebody to start partying.

-when somebody asks you what you do, you say your job title, and not 'raver'