Who Am I This Time?

Kurt Vonnegut's classic story "Who Am I This Time?" features a woman new in town looking to make friends and fit in, so she joins a community theater company. There she meets a painfully shy and awkward man who becomes someone else entirely when he plays Stanley Kowalski to her Stella. Yet, is he really someone else, or is he the man inside who has up to then been too shy to emerge? The film version stars Susan Sarandon and Christopher Walken, a pair of actors who managed to get a few more jobs after that one.

I'm not necessarily looking to make friends since I have a swell collection of them, but if anything is true of the intertubes, it's that friendships do form between the bits and the bytes. If new friends happen along, welcome.

In the meantime, I'm musing about my own intentions in starting this blog. I'm probably kidding myself if I think I have time to maintain it, but as a recent convert to Facebook, I'm interested in a medium that allows for communication with my friends and family....but without character limits.

So, here's the blog, but now I have to consider the question: Who am I this time? More sophisticated and/or sensitive writers recognize that any piece of writing, especially personal writing, calls for the writer to take on a persona. Am I silly, stuffy, sanguine, garrulous, groggy, grumpy, professorial, pissed off, polished? (Or just showing off my vocabulary?) How much of myself do I reveal? Regardless of the form of communication, we humans always offer parts of ourselves while keeping other parts hidden. (And frequently we reveal other parts unwittingly.) Where is the line between what I have and what you get? Where should the line be?

Vonnegut's story questions the nature of identity and acknowledges that who we are on the inside doesn't always correspond with who we are on the outside (or how others perceive that outside us). Who I am on the blog may or may not correspond with who I am on the outside (or who you think I am). Let's find out.