saturday, august 18

[identity, dishonesty, and the internet, part 2: psyche's anatomy]

the internet, at least the part that focuses on people and not on corporations, makes it very easy for anyone who wants to create a false identity to do so. I'm not sure that there's a higher percentage of fakers-to-non-fakers on the web than there are in the rest of the world, but I do think they feel safer here in the voluntary anonymity provided (and even nurtured) by the web, and so we are more easily taken in, because why should we not trust someone whose words we hear inside our own heads?

I am not a faker, and I trust everyone I know online to be equally genuine, but somehow I am rarely surprised when one of them turns out not to be. I'm not sure why. maybe because I feel tempation tugging at me sometimes to be something more than I am, perhaps a little more tragic, a little more triumphant. when I made my first webpage (five years ago!), I kept all my personal information completely (and conspicuously) absent for security reasons -- before wockerjabby, my real name was nowhere on the web -- but my conscious and vigilant refusal to reveal my concrete offline identity made me equally, almost painfully, aware that I could be anyone I liked. I could be more myself than I actually was.

I think many (I would say "all" but then someone would set out to prove me wrong) of us have complicated relationships with our personalities. we hate our weaknesses and take pride in our strengths, even when we're not entirely sure which characteristics are which. we have our achilles heels, the pieces of ourselves that seem to unfailingly get us in trouble (mine is my absolute lack of self-discipline), single-edged swords pointed directly inwards. we have our glass jaws, the places where even a glancing blow is nearly deadly (constructive criticism is fine and good, but tell me I am uncreative and I will try to refrain from even thinking for weeks). we have brains and bile and everything in between. and I think we all have one or two pet personality traits, the things we desperately want to be recognized for. everyone thinks, from time to time, that he or she is the weirdest person on the planet; we toss around the word "insane" as if there were no such thing as asylums. but some people really want to be weird, to be seen as weird, maybe even revered as the epitome of weirdness in our time. I'm sure you know one of them, possibly even more than one of them (which makes the whole thing a little sad, I suppose). tell them they're weird and they're so happy they melt in your hand. not everyone is so fond of being weird, but I do think we are all overly fond of some personality trait, perhaps of one that most other people wouldn't pick out as dominant or even desirable. I know people who want to be seen as empathetic, as ruthlessly competitive, as passive-aggressive, as relentlessly optimistic, as thoroughly neurotic: sometimes they keep these wishes secret (even from themselves); sometimes they cultivate their pet characteristics; sometimes they preen in public when someone recognizes them for who they wish to be, whether or not it's who they truly are. once you figure out someone's pet trait, though, you've got a huge advantage. (I can't tell you what mine is, because then I would be under your thumb.)

on the web, it's easy to make people see the parts you want them to see, and only slightly more different to keep the other parts hidden, if you really want to. the thing about written communication is that you can edit it, tweak it, fix it, revise it, embellish it, even delete it entirely before you hit the send button. if you're careful, you can almost completely avoid the risk of letting yourself leak out in little accidental bits, because you can make sure you are who you want to be before you let anyone else see it.

I could tell you that I'm five-seven, one hundred twenty pounds, with perfect blue eyes and cascading chocolate-colored hair (which I very much wished to have when I was little with unruly blond flyaways constantly surrounding my face), but it would take only a single meeting or a single person who knows me offline to blow my cover. on the other hand, I can shape my words to make myself seem nicer, happier, smarter, more compassionate and sensitive and imaginative than I actually am, and who could really call me out? it's easy to dismiss fantasy bodies because we have real, physical bodies constantly grounding us, but our real personalities are as ephemeral and abstract as our fantasy personas, and until you can get a grip on something you can't really throw it away.

I'm always fairly certain that we don't really know each other, but we may be equally bad at knowing ourselves, online or off.
21:56 ++

friday, august 17

[identity, dishonesty, and the internet, part 1: instigation & inspiration]

I know I've been making vague references to being uncomfortable with my (or maybe your) identity on the web, but this actually had nothing to do with that, at least not at first. I was surfing around the web and I came across this journal entry of robin's, in which she asks her readers to tell her how they see her. she later says: "if most folks' perception of me is totally different from my perception of myself, then I'm either not doing a very good job [...] sharing myself with you, giving folks the wrong impression of myself, or not seeing every part of who I really am."

I thought about it on the bike ride home. in my mind, the purpose of wockerjabby was never really to explore my personality or anything -- self-expression yes; self-sharing not so much. given that, how likely is it that you guys would know who I am? wockerjabby isn't really about me, it's about the world. the words and the pictures and everything here are my creations, but (for the most part) they are reflections of my external environment, because that's what inspires me with its infuriating ability to defy description. even the memories I relate and stories of my childhood (and my currenthood) are, to me, less about who I am than they are about what the world is. of course, it's impossible to completely separate the creation from the creator (I can't go so far as to call myself an artist or a writer, really) so you are bound to see something of me, whether I want you to or not.

the question, then, becomes: whose perception of me is more accurate, yours or mine? everyone will probably have a slightly different perspective on the kind of person I am, but all of you share a perspective that is completely alien to me, one that will always be absolutely beyond my ability to experience and understand. if I'm not really trying to represent myself here at all, does that mean I've created a less accurate picture (by leaving things out and focusing selectively on the things I want to talk about) or a more accurate picture (by revealing myself indirectly through my words) than I would have if I thought of wockerjabby as an autobiographical webjournal? if you see me differently than I see myself, as I'm sure you do, is that because you see some truth that I have been subconciously avoiding? or it is because I have obscured my real self with all this storytelling and description?

I know that rabi-on-the-internet is a different person from rabi-on-the-rugby-pitch or rabi-on-a-first-date or whatever, and I know that we are all constantly presenting carefully selected, audience-dependent facets of ourselves with every intention of leaving some things out. we do it partly to protect ourselves and partly to protect everyone around us, and sometimes we push our knowledge of it into the subconscious so we don't have to think about it, but we wouldn't be human without such subtleties. still, I would like to think that no amount of persona-subdividing can create a wholly artificial person if the intent is genuine. it hurts to look at a naked lightbulb, so we dress them up in lampshades or fixtures to turn the light softer, to make it a different color, to dispell it gently across an entire room or keep it cornered, but the illuminating light is fundamentally the same no matter how you distort it or obscure it after it's been emitted. I had confidence that I am fundamentally the same person in all situations no matter how many different masks (or lampshades) I wear, but once I started thinking about it I suddenly became less sure of that. I'm concerned only with rabi-on-the-internet here. if you think she's a very different -- different beyond the margin of error allowed for by differences in perception -- person than I do, then there's some level of unintentional dishonesty here. and that, I think, is something I'm afraid of.

(as an autobiographical side-note, the reason this is so inarticulately-written and organized is because I actually thought about it in internal-monologue-format before I wrote it down. you think I'm joking when I say I just sit down and write most of the time, that the things I write aren't even words until they get to my fingers, but it's not a joke at all.)
17:26 ++

thursday, august 16

last night I curled up on the grass under clouds the color of reflected sunset and listened to the longwood symphony orchestra play beethoven and beethoven and beethoven. the horns were a little thin and the strings lost step a few times, but it was okay because there were flapping birds and roaring motorcycles and an entire family sitting next to me on a plastic tablecloth, alternately playing poker in english and jabbering at each other in chinese, and all together it was the perfect outdoor city concert, rough around the edges and very much alive.

after the sun had fallen behind the river, I sat up and watched the amber-glowing hatch shell, intermittently obscured by the two-dimensional sillhouettes of people walking in front of me, and with it all miked-up and flanked by speakers on either side of the stage full of a black-and-white mass bowing in tiny unison, it seemed as if the entire orchestra were throwing its voice. they finished with the pastorale, and even now although I have thom yorke's oxford accent in my headphones, in my head and my spirit I still hear the happy gratitude after the storm and the warm crash of heartfelt applause.
11:05 ++

wednesday, august 15

my hair is so short!!!
23:45 ++

today's fun new york times headline: cosmic laws like speed of light might be changing, a study finds.

I'm picturing temp workers sitting at desks wearing telephone headsets, wearily calling all the cosmic laws (right at dinnertime of course) to poll them on the state of their constants. over the last six million years, would you say your wavelength habits have changed: a) not at all; b) a little bit; c) a lot; d) completely ?

and if it turns out to be right, it will be... well, amazing. if you like, you can read the entire paper in pdf form (the link will take you to the abstract).
18:24 ++

mcdonald's special sauce isn't a secret anymore, and I am very glad that I never ate it. it's nice that they managed to at least leave the egg yolks out of the ketchup. also note the total lack of vegan salads (not that I would ever eat anything at mcdonalds and expect it to be vegan or even vegetarian really, but still). and I love this from the french fries (and also the fish) ingredients list: Dimethylpolysiloxane added as an anti-foaming agent.

anti-foaming?? rabid fries, anyone?
12:46 ++

tuesday, august 14

okay, to clarify, since I know not all of you read the comments: I didn't mean that I'm going around inventing stuff. I'm not. this is all real. it's just written down.
23:42 ++

if I were to ask you to tell me who you think I am, would your answers tell me more about how dishonest I am to you, or how dishonest I am to myself? are they the same thing?
19:40 ++

monday, august 13

with a little tweaking, it could have been a scene in a romantic comedy:

the thunderstorm broke just as I left the bank, so I took the subway instead of walking even though I was only one stop away from home. I've been feeling silly, so dependent on things with motors and rails to carry me around, but today I reveled in it, holding the bar lightly with my fingertips, watching the muscles in my forearm flex and relax and flex again as the train turned a corner, singing to myself under the squeal of wheels and a crying baby, warm and dry beneath the electric-wet streets.

out at the station, through the old black-painted metal gate, up the token-entrance-only stairs, the narrow ones that barely have room for two medium-sized people to run past each other without touching. they're red stone, slippery and somehow always wet even when it's not raining, because parts of central square are just like that, coated in grime and the smell of hopelessness. today they were almost underwater, covered in dirty shredded newspaper and shoesole mud, and as I ran up them I was pulling my blue raincoat on over my backpack and my arms and my head, but I only had it halfway there when suddenly the man was in front of me and it was inevitable. he was ten stairs above me, probably, with brown pinstriped suitpants and slick brown dress shoes and an umbrella clutched in one hand, and even as I knew he was about to slip I was looking at the grey hair around his ears and the golden-red rims of his bifocals. and then he was falling, and I didn't know what to do, so I caught him.

it shouldn't have worked. I'm solid but I'm still small, and the stairs and walls were wet and my arms were half-trapped inside my raincoat. but there we were, me with my back against the wall and my hood pushed backwards off my hair, leaving my head unguarded against the plummeting rain; he was a leaden ragdoll in my arms, with flailing feet trying to get a hold on the stairs, his glasses crooked against my shoulder and his hair burying my nose in coarseness. then he stood up and pulled away, and we stared into each other's eyes, and I think we both blushed but maybe it was just the sting of cold rain on our cheeks. I was gaping in unchecked shock, and somehow I had managed to hang on to my walkman and it was tangled around his umbrella. we were clumsy, getting it off, and our hands kept brushing against each other and we apologized over and over and there were people piled up on either side of us, wanting to go up or down or something, and I wasn't thinking straight because I had just caught a full-grown man and suddenly I felt very much like a child and somehow everything was backwards.

and, and, and.

my life wants to be a movie but it doesn't know how! tomorrow more dentists, who will tell me that there's nothing we can do about my damaged nerve; I will try not to think about the symbolism.
19:21 ++

sunday, august 12

funny how your hair can start out smelling just like you and shampoo, even when it's out and flying in the kitchen air next to ginger and basil on a cutting board, but then something as simple as finger-combing or gentle as a twirl around a wrist can leave it smelling like you and shampoo and someone else, intermingled so that even though you know there are three different smells there you can find only one: and so you see why I am so picky about whom I allow to play with my hair, because smelling like someone else is one of the few manifestations of true intimacy in absentia.
23:01 ++

for those of you who care, today's astropic of eggs in the eagle nebula gives a nice succinct summary of the stuff I've been studying this summer. of course my pictures are of a different nebula, one that's much farther away (so it's much harder to pick out structural features in the gas clouds), but m16 is the subject of the now-classic paper that kick-started this whole field of inquiry. it's good stuff.
14:03 ++