My mirror never lies but it always verifies...
iniren was reading through the Boston Phoenix during her visit last week and came across some self-promotional filler that read:
Be as hip and trendy in real life as you pretend to be on the web.
For some reason, iniren thought that applied directly to me. While I do enjoy putting my life out there for others to “admire”, the more I think about it, the less I think that phrase applies to me.
Consider those adjectives: hip and trendy. In all honesty, neither of those really apply to me. I’m way too old to be hip, and I’ve never really followed changing trends in order to be stylish. Really, I don’t think I depict my life as being either hip or trendy. But do I depict my life as more grandiose than it really is?
Well, how *does* my life come across? “Eventful” is probably pretty accurate. If nothing else, my life has a lot of stuff going on. It’s a pretty full life-sometimes a bit too full-and that does show up in my blog and on OrnothLand.
What else? “Active” is probably good, and my writing about the activities I enjoy assures myself and others that I’m getting out and doing things, rather than spending my adult years sitting in my own gravity well watching CSI or 24 or something equally inane. So that, too, is a reasonable conclusion to derive.
Others? “Cosmopolitan?” “Reflective”? “Ethical”? “Self-absorbed”? I dunno.
So if that ad copy had said, “Have a life as active and eventful as you pretend yours is on the web”, then that would hit a lot closer to the mark. Although in that case, since the adjectives are pretty accurate, the whole “pretend” angle doesn’t really apply. Though the bottom line is that, yes, I suppose I do try to portray my life in fairly superlative terms that sometimes exceed the reality. But it’s for a good cause!
On a tangential note, a couple days ago I was looking at the list of people who read my blog, and was pretty shocked. There’s actually about forty people who have me on their Friends List, and most of them are people I know or have some type of meaningful friendship with. It was kind of odd to see that, since my self-image is that I’m pretty isolated and don’t have many friends at all. The ironic part is that there are no DargonZine people in that list, other than a couple former writers who recently reestablished contact. Very strange. Glad to have you all here, tho!