Bio in a Box
People rarely ask me Who are you? (obvious situations aside). It is much easier to ask What are you?; the responses come back packaged in neat familiar terms - Oh I'm a graduate student. I have a day job at the mall, but my real passion is my music. I was a wrestler for many years, but I was just elected Governor.
Those are easy answers, and essentially hollow. What does it really tell you if I say that I am a user interface designer working for the management consultantcy arm of a Big Six Five Firm?
Now, let me tell you that I've changed the phrase "I am a user..." to "I am an user..." and back again at least six times since I've written it. Which of the two details gives you more insight into who I am?
We are so used to putting ourselves into separate buckets that we begin to think of the world in those broad sweeping terms. How many people assumed that Jesse "The Body/Mind" Ventura is going to be a joke as a governor based on his current profession?
Dan Rather could barely restrain a laugh on election night. Ventura may end up being a crummy governor, but his ability to do that job will depend on his character, not his past tights-clad incarnation.
Who am I is a hard question to ask - and to answer. To ask is to make an investment. To tell is to trust. And for most people, their own answer is rarely clear, and never still.
I am not the thirteen year old girl I once was, and I am not the forty-one year old I will be. We share common threads, and she is recognizable in me, but I think of myself in wholly different terms than I did at the age of thirteen.
So, who am I? You aren't likely to learn the depth and breadth of my soul from my website. Your investment in reading through is matched by yen for privacy. I am willing to trust the world with only so much information, and people who visit my website with just that much more.
I am more than willing to tell people of my slightly evil and quixotic nature, for instance, and of my appreciation for the curve of a well designed g. I'm the kind of person who doesn't mind waiting to be one of the last people off the plane, but I hate to check my baggage if I can help it.
I like to watch how the world works around me - the stars shifting accross a sky, the interval between their light turning red, and mine green, children climbing through a jungle gym, people on the street.
Every cab ride is an adventure into the essence of America, and I won the NCAA basketball pool last year at work. I don't feel right if I don't have a book to read, and the news can really piss me off.
