Profile This!

About me. I’m not fooled by this demanding little phrase that lurks around on blogs and other websites. This is really just a profile – and “profile” is simply a euphemism for “autobiography.” Such a thoroughly abhorrent realm.

Why such a reluctance to chronicle my life? Like everything else, it has its little black roots back in the tedium of my childhood. There was always one thing you could count on during the first week of school each September. The teacher placed the Gun of Obedience to your head and compelled you to write “What I Did on My Summer Vacation”. Unless you had spent the summer trekking in the Himalayas, or had been lucky enough to have wrestled with a rabid bear and two cubs underneath your back porch, this assignment was fraught with peril. You could come up looking duller than dust and I routinely propelled myself right to the top of the dust heap.

My composition invariably read something like, “We went to our cottage. My Dad caught a fish.” After that I was pretty much stumped. Even then I could recognize this autobiographical gusher was a bit of a literary embarrassment. The real meat of the summer wasn’t suitable material for school compositions: my uncle had discovered that he could keep beer cold in the well and stayed drunk for fourteen days proving it; my mother had murdered a snake with an with an axe so dull that the snake committed suicide to ends its own suffering; a sibling drank too much Purple Jesus and passed it off as food poisoning; the boy next door kissed me; I began to suspect that boys were not nearly half so disgusting as I had thought… You can see how things could get totally out of control if you ever started indulging yourself biographically.

More than a few years have intervened since anyone has had enough power over me to make me crank out a weary memoir. I haven’t been inclined to explore the profile-driven social networking services like Facebook. But now, after years of autobiography-free bliss, I have succumbed to the lure of blogging. And with that comes the wanton cries of the “about me” section. Suddenly, I am propelled all the way back to my seat at school, chewing on a tasty sodden pencil, mired in a blank haze. And when I think about it, things haven’t really changed all that much. I still go to the cottage in the summer. My Dad is no longer there to catch a fish. Me? I’m quite happy to leave the fish right where they are. And, for the most part, this seems to make the fish happy too. And it still happens – I still get sweaty palms and a film of fur on my tongue every time I start trolling for that ever elusive fodder - something, anything, to put in the “about me” section!