Twenty minutes into blogging and I already hit my first roadblock: "display name." When faced with the same decision 21 years ago, my parents gave me the display name "Kevin Richard Adams," but even that didn't come without deliberation and uncertainty. This decision of mine is far more inconsequential, and having reread the first chapter of Moby-Dick today-- which begins, "Call me Ishmael."-- my choice was natural. Ishmael knows the meaninglessness (what a terribly ugly word) of an arbitrary label, and if I may quote another literary gem: "What's in a name?" The whole thing seems to be rather silly; the complexity of the human soul cannot be encapsulated in two words, and any attempt to do so is doomed to misrepresent. Besides, I prefer to think of myself as the archetypal human. My name purports individuality, but I'm imprisoned in the same reality as you.
Had to throw some Shakespeare in there for you, Nikki.
Forgive me, imagined audience, for pausing to dwell on so trivial a thing as my display name. But in as open a forum as this, I cannot help but acutely reflect on every decision I make. This is my inaugural post! People who have never seen my writing will, two minutes from now, make definitive judgments of my abilities, my major, and me. I must establish my voice. But what is a voice? Why assume I can cobble together coherence from the medley of contradictions that is my consciousness? And why assume my voice is a qualified representative of my mind? Many questions remain unanswerable, but most intriguing to me is simply: why assume anyone cares to read what I write? I mean, think about it. What have I actually written here? An odd sort of introspection, it seems. But is there any substance?
Maybe my writing is simply that: my writing. If you enjoy it, you're welcomed to come back. And if you don't understand it, that makes two of us.
