Eccentric Flower:199901/whos who in my universe

ten january

who's who in my universe

On Saturday it was over fifty degrees. The snow was melting so fast on Saturday morning that it was making clouds of mist. I am not making this up. I bought a 1000-piece jigsaw and a tray for catproofing, and worked the whole thing in a single evening, without once turning on the computer.

When I came back to my mail, several people had written about my angsty comments re the schism between Columbine and her puppeteer. Some felt the "voice" in these postcards was consistent. Others expressed confusion. Shmuel will speak for the latter:

Both of you are interesting people, with well-reasoned opinions, and thought processes I like listening in on. And I'd be happy to read thoughts by some combination of the two, but I have to admit that the current combination thereof leaves me a bit confused. So ... let me ask you: Do you see Columbine as a distinct persona? Or do you really see yourself as an amalgam of the two?

Oh, god, I wish I knew.

Due to dysphoria and my upbringing (and I apologize to all males in advance) I tend to associate some of the more flagrant emotional reactions - anger and stubbornness, in particular - with "maleness," and avoid them. (Jealousy is the only dark emotion I find especially female, but it's impolite.) If I am to be "ladylike" - and my idea of "ladylike" is a rather Victorian one; Miss Manners would probably deem it over-conservative - then I must suppress many aspects of my male personality from appearing. As a male, I leap to judgement rather too quickly and have a venomous tongue.

On the other hand, it is often more entertaining to read venom than sweetness and light, so if we are considering the journal as public entertainment, it's probably desirable to let those aspects out once in a while.

If we're considering the journal as a personal record for me, frankly, I have as much of a need to know what upset or hurt me as what pleased and thrilled me.

The thing is, my ideals of femininity are moderately repressed ones. In my upbringing, a woman never admits it when something ticks her off; she smiles pleasantly and then arranges a solution to the problem quietly - either fixes it herself, or puts her foot down with a smile still on her face, or shoots someone in the dark and dumps their body in the river and is never caught. The women in my family are capable of anything.

My male side sometimes (not always) thinks that's a really silly way of doing business. And sometimes he agrees that the female way is better, but can't hold his temper enough to implement it. Ironically, the better I am at being my ideal female in public, the worse I look here - since these postcards are often the outlet for things I cannot permit myself to say aloud to other people.

Finally, Columbine may own these postcards, but my male aspect is the one which has experiences in the real world - and I can't write about Columbine's purely virtual existence for very long; it wouldn't be much of a journal.

What I am shooting here is for my female personality interpreting my male experiences. Call it Columbine's take on someone else's daily events. But, yes, it will always be an amalgam, and if you can sort out who's who, you're doing better than I.

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