Monday, 18th July, 2005

Duality²

I am, quite frankly, not myself at the moment. Literally. I've talked in the past about how this whole blogging malarky is akin to acting for me — how Siobhan is a voice in my head — a character that I play, and well, I'm finding it hard at the moment.

No idea why that is, but I suspect it's got something to do with self-image. Normally, I can engage full Self Delision Mode™ when looking in a mirror, and somehow convince myself that there's a woman looking back at me — but all I'm seeing right now is "bloke".

I don't know whether other bloggers have this or not (I suspect not really) but it's part of my fascination with how we relate to our Online Selves. I need to be Siobhan when I'm writing — and just at the moment, no matter what I do, I just can't find her

Let me try to explain this a little better...

Last Wednesday, as I mentioned, Kath and I went to a Uni function. I can't remember what time I got home, but when I did, I wrote that, poured myself a glass of wine, and sat down with our local 'paper'.

Now, our local 'paper' (at least, the free one that comes through my letterbox whether I want it or not) is called The Citizen. It's one of the most insipid pieces of shit that ever masqueraded as a "newspaper" — but it's free, and so sometimes I have a glance through it.

I remember staring in disbelief at the sheer inaccuracy of the front page story...

Pubs and bars in Lancaster and Morecambe were jam-packed as hot and bothered locals headed for refreshment this week.

...combined with a full-page photograph of about three people sitting on the beach. (NRT has already blogged this, so I won't repeat him too much)

And then I remember working my way through the 'news' stories, and getting more and more angry.

By the time I actually went to bed, I was ranting and raving to myself, and composing a letter in my head that went something like this:

Dear Citizen people,
Is there, perhaps, a way that I could ask you not to shove your tree-wasting piece of lazy-journalistic crap through my door each week?

And, realising that that probably wouldn't help, I thought about sticking a note on my door that read:

If you push The Citizen through my letterbox, I will track you down and break your legs.

...

Now this (you might be thinking to yourself) is not a new, out-of-character thing for me. Kathie often comments on how I seemed to have pulled myself up into the "Grumpy Old Men" demographic two years too early.

But for some reason, this mood has stuck with me ever since. I've been gradually getting more and more and more frustrated, irritated, and, well, grumpy as each day has gone on.

For example, I made the mistake of watching a Julie Birchill (wikipedia) documentary on Chavs the other night (she writes about it here). And I found myself fuming after it. She really wound me up.

Granted, I realise that she winds everyone up — but it just added to my mood.

...

So yeah, all this week I've just been getting more and more grumpy about things. Even hair-care adverts:

What makes your shampoo different?

It's the only shampoo that contains [insert ridiculously technical-sounding made-up scientific name of something just to impress the proles]

...

Sorry — I'm doing it again. Ranting.

"But Siobhan", I hear you ponder, "ranting is not unusual for you. In fact, all you ever do is rant"

Aye, but I rant about things in a particular way. And I seemed to have got so grumpy over the past week that I've reached the point where I can't rant in that way anymore.

And no amount of wearing ludicrous frills and meringues seems to help (trust me, I've tried)

Pauline, Help Me Out Here

Do you know what I think I need? I think I need to go see Pauline again. I think I need to spend a whole day finding Siobhan again.

If Eddie Izzard's "Transvestites are like superheroes" analogy is to be believed, then I think that for me, The Birdcage is my equivalent of that bit in Superman II where he goes to the big ice-palace in the North Pole

(At the moment, you could probably quite reasonably picture me sitting in a bar, flicking peanuts at the bottles on the shelves with great force)

Thank You...

...BTW for the comments, and the emails, and the phonecalls. It's rather nice to know that people care enough to get in touch, even after only a few days of silence.

Who was it that left the "the comments in here are getting sillier by the entry" comment? It wasn't me and I can't be bothered to go back through the logs and find out who it was.

Graham/Siobhan/Graham, wot's the diff?

Well, actually, there's a big difference.

In normal terms (where "normal" == not online) there's obviously no difference at all. I think that a lot of transvestites struggle with the bizarrity of inventing a new persona for ouselves, then trying to integrate that into their lives. I've seen a lot of trannies bleat on about how they're two seperate people — not in a throw-away kinda way, but in a "I think I have a multiple-personality disorder" kinda way.

Which I think is bullshit. It's a pseudo-psychological hotchpotch of misinformed ideas and pub-philosophy. It's a beleagured attempt to try and attach some form of validity onto something which for some reason isn't seen as valid in its own right.

It's also, perhaps, offensive to people who do suffer from schizophrenia — especially as the word "schizophrenia" is often used as a 'key-word' to indicate a split personality.

In spite of its name, schizophrenia does not involve a 'split personality', and should not be confused with disassociative identity disorder as it often is in literature, film and other forms of popular culture

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schizophrenia)

I'm always keen to point out that I don't see Siobhan and Graham as two seperate people, despite my "Graham == serious, Siobhan == playtime" mantra. I think it would be ludicrous of me to somehow suggest that I've got two people living in my head — and in regard to me burbling on about how I act differently depending on what I'm wearing, as I've said before, I think it's just the same as me walking a bit different if I'm wearing a suit.

Clothes affect how you feel about yourself — they don't change who you are.

But (she said, aware of the weirdness of saying something then in the very next paragraph completely contradicting yourself...) there's a big difference between me, and the person who occupies my online role.

(This is even weirder — because the minute I write this, I become the "person occupying my online role". God — I'm in danger of losing the plot here...)

Before my old website disappeared in a *phut* of sizzling magnetic media, I found that I could sum "Siobhan" up entirely in that little cartoon of me:

Whenever I was writing, I'd have that picture in my head, and I'd write in the way that I thought she'd talk.

That's who Siobhan was.

And, I think Becky's little description of her above...

Knowing her personality type, she's probably just down the street being fed by an old lady who thinks she's hers. In a week's time she'll saunter back in as if nothing's happened, and curl up in her favorite spot in your psyche for a nap.

...is pretty spot on.

Anyone who's met me (I hope) would probably agree with me that I'm not really like that at all. But I have a character that I play.

I took that Advanced Global Personality Test thing that I spotted on Miss K's weblog the other day. And I think you'll agree that the type of person it said I am, is completely different to the Bubbly Princess™ that I try and write as.

messy, depressed, introverted, feels invisible, does not make friends easily, nihilistic, reveals little about self, fragile, dark, bizarre, feels undesirable, dislikes leadership, reclusive, weird, irritable, frequently second guesses self, unassertive, unsympathetic, low self control, observer, worrying, phobic, suspicious, unproductive, avoidant, negative, bad at saving money, emotionally sensitive, does not like to stand out, dislikes large parties, submissive, daydreamer

...

Recently, after I started using this...

...as my across-the-board avatar, I noticed that the way I was writing had changed. Instead of the aforementioned Bubbly Princess™, I'd started taking a bit more of a serious tone — the kind of tone you'd expect someone who bends over and looks at you menacingly with one eye would use.

Basically, what I'm trying to say is that the people that we become when we're online — whether that's in a weblog or it's on a forum, or whatever — are constructed from a lot of things. Partly who we actually are, but also partly who we think we are, and partly who we expect other people to see us as.

In my case, that's based a lot on a tiny 48x48 pixel representation of myself. In some other cases, that other self is a 22 year old furrie princess, when you're really a 14-year-old boy.

Now, if yous'll excuse me, I'm going to try and recapture my inner muse by spending the entire evening wearing the Tiny Skirt That My Friends Officially Hate™

PS. Peter, thank you for introducing me to LJDrama

Gravity

Just on the subject of Avatars (which, I found out to my surprise and intellectual pleasure the other day, is a Hindu word meaning "the incarnation (bodily manifestation) of an Immortal Being" [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avatar]) Becky drew my attention to this earlier:

http://fgiasson.com/blog/index.php?title=gravatar_com_is_down_what_could_we_do_if&more=1&c=1&tb=1&pb=1

That's such a shame. Gravatars were really really cool, and I think there must be a lot of weblogs and other sites that have suddenly lost a lot of their charm these past few days.

Not sure what's going on with gravatar.com — but if there was a way to help then I would.

(Kathie calls them "Gravities", hence the title )

Having said that, due to a rather sloppy bit of coding on my part, you don't have to rely on having a Gravatar to show an image here. Just stick the url to an image in the 'email' bit of the form below.

I do it myself, whenever I want to use my boy-avatar without the inconvenience of my comment-parser pulling my real name from my other Flickr account

Photoshoots

There aren't enough pictures of me on the Internet.

This is partly my own fault — being the Little Miss Self-Conscious that I am, ruthlessly editing the small collection that does exist down to about two or three that I'm absolutely happy with.

But it's also down to my unadventurous self-portrait style* — constantly taking pictures in the same place, time after time. ie. In My Bedroom™

(* Yes, I've just realised that that makes it completely my fault)

So, here is a list of ideas for photoshoots that I'm going to try and persuade other people to help me with, to increase the amount of me online...

• Big Dress
  In which I chivvy Beth along, and get her to finish that dress of mine so that I can do a photoshoot of me prancing through early-morning woodlands in a blatant attempt to get on the front page of Repartee Magazine, rather than just being a one-off columnist.

• Trash
  In which yours truly gets herself photographed in seedy locations with the following props:

  • A wedding dress
  • A bottle of wine
  • A cigarette
  • A gutter

• Genderfuck
  In which I screw around with as many heads as possible by doing a completely girled-up photoshoot, whilst wearing a suit and tie

• Nekkid
  In which I take all of my clothes off.

(That last one is a lie )

Other Blogs

I have, as you might expect, a list of other blogs that I read. In fact, it's over there, on the left, up a bit.

But as well as adding as many as I can to my RSS reader*, some of the things I read don't have RSS feeds, so I have a list of everything in a bookmark folder in my bookmark bar in Safari, and all I have to do is select "Open in Tabs" from the menu to catch up on things.

(i. My RSS reader of choice is NetNewsWire. ii. that's a rather nice multiple use of the word "as" there)

In my little self-enforced-absence-from-the-web, a lot of people wrote a lot of things. Things that I would have liked to have commented on at the time, but hesitated either because they have no comments script, or because I was pretending to be invisible.

So, to compensate:

• Tom
  That reminds me of something.
  BTW. "Orlando"?! WTF?

• Miss K
  That was very very cool indeed

• NRT
  They did the same thing to the surface of the cycle-path across Giant Axe.

• Looby
  That reminds me about this awful train journey I had once...

• Mike
  Have I mentioned ever that I love the nipples?

• C'lam
  More *hugs*

• Becky
  Quit adding exclamation marks to things that I've said. Makes me sound like a Live Journalist...

• Jon
  Wanna come round sometime and compare fonts?

• Rob
  I know you're all like "Working For Macworld" now, but could you please write something?

• Peter
  Are you annoyed with me?

• Kris
  Funnily enough, I once tried to pull a vicar. Unfortunately, I used the chat-up-line "I'm so pissed I haven't a fucking clue what I'm doing"

• Joanna
  Oh how I laughed

• Rachel
  More writing about me please

• Karol
  Can I be the first to confess that, unlike yourself, I'm still turned on by dressing as a girl.

I Found My Muse

You know that things that Dads do that's really annoying every time you lose something?

Where did I leave my keys/diary/soul/muse?

Where did you last have it?

Two things:

1. I know I'm going to do exactly the same when I become a Dad

2. The first place to look, regardless of what it is that you've lost, is half-way down a bottle of wine.