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 naïve 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 things about me.