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About Me: A Noegenic Summation
I permit very few photos of me; one is from my driver's license, the other an unavoidable snapshot.
The more formal presentations I make at colloquia and symposia on topics important to me and unlikely to you � see here, I�ve already both discounted myself and revealed my occasional pretentiousness, but more on that later � the more I�ve had to write succinct blurbs About Me that find their way into program guides and the glossy paper recycle bin. Freed here from 100-word constraints, I offer a noegenic summary that is thoroughly non-descript and reveals much if nothing at all.
I love knowing words but would never announce during an exchange of Hi, how are you and What makes you tick? that I am a gynotikolobomassophile, or a man who likes to nibble on a woman�s earlobe. Words like tetricity, hypobulia, evagation, words that have no proper place and time nowadays but did before thrill me and it is a palpable thrill, if not an example of how I do not go out enough.
Like you and everybody else, I�m the Great Underachiever and relish the wallow, the tired hand-wringing proclamations I don�t know what to do with my life as cold as the beer in my hand. I once had great plans and now, well those plans aren�t clear at present. My work history is a confusion of the cerebral and physical: Warehouse grunt, (visiting) professor at an Ivy League university; high school teacher, sign language interpreter; published writer of poetry, contracted writer of textbooks. I simply do not know what it is I want. I lack the passion of direction. When I chance a whiff, I pursue until I�m either bored or convinced the endeavor isn�t for me and I�m chasing somebody else�s To Be. What this means is that I�m unfulfilled and unhappy because I�m the type that identifies, pursues, and owns, the one who writes Addenda to the line Happy Ever After, far from content to leave things unscripted.
I want a good deal of intangibles like friendship (I call very few my friends, and fewer still call me their friend), a sense of who I am (see below, under tired hand-wringing), confidence. Things like that. In other words, I�ve realized I�m lonely by my own design and don�t understand myself, leaving me in a position of needing Addendum-writing and having nothing to say.
Tired Hand-Wringing:
●I want to be close to people, have people be close to me, but I push them away.
●I couldn�t tell you if I�m straight, bi, gay, or confused. I�m all of it.
●I prefer the safe to the risky, the known to the thrill of the unknown, the content to the psaphonic [Editor�s Note: planning one�s rise to fame.] but despise myself for the fear to take chances, to move on. I�d rather stay in an unfulfilling job than accept the dream position offered me.
●I whine and don�t understand why.
●Why do I say I don�t understand why as often as I do?
●Am I na�ve or just stupid? I can�t tell.
●Overwhelmed by the uneasiness I feel, the distrust I have for people and new places; contrast with the desire to be close to people.
Things I don�t mind having you know about me:
○I�m trying to work on my weaknesses and open up not only here in the journal but person-to-person, though it seems I regress more than progress.
○I respond best to expectations, though for all the wrong reasons.
○I�m told I can be charming and funny, deep and profound, endearing and sincere; contrasted with scheming, manipulative, evil, pretentious, disregarding, aloof, rude, deliberately snooty, on a high moral-intellectual-social horse. They�re all valid, depending on the whom and when.
○I love to laugh.
○I feel like a child masquerading as an adult and not quite carrying it off.
Things I mind having you know about me (this is the This is Therapeutic for You section):
▪I�m vulnerable and fear being hurt. When in doubt, I take the offense.
▪I�m afraid of the dark more often than I admit, preoccupied with what I call the Bogeyman. [Editor�s note: What instead of whom; edit?]
▪Deep, dark fear: That my Bogeyman will come back and realizing how little control I have over self-destruction.
▪Deeper, dark fear: That I�ll always be like this, fixated on how today is because of yesterday and being unable to revisit the past to change the current.
▪I am as utterly boring and non-descript as I seem.
Why do I write? The notion that upon my death my journal cannot be read by family appeals more than it should since it reflects my (once?) preoccupation with dying young. I�m older than the age at which I thought I would expire, which confuses me. Anyway, I�m compelled by the feeling that with each journal entry I write, the better I become because I (usually) resist the overpowering urge to delete. And it's good for me.
100 more things about me.
