I am seventeen years old. I am a senior, both in high school and in behavioral age. I have short hair, straight teeth after three years of braces, and perpetually painted fingernails. I love to write, I love to read, I love remaining in my pajamas and marathoning Star Wars and 30 Rock in thirteen-hour stints over weekends. I love New York City and cats, and I talk about waffles too often.
I have mixed feelings about introductions. How can I squeeze the many important facts about myself into a quick, non-boring, easy to remember blurb? What facts do I choose? Should I explain my character traits, my interests, my opinion on Disney's purchase of Lucasfilm? I can never decide. Sometimes it's all of the above. Sometimes I only discuss (yell about) my love of television. Sometimes my introduction of myself is really just an introduction of my cat in disguise. Sometimes I just talk about the weather for a very long time at which point literally no one cares, Sam, stop talking, ugh. But no matter how I introduce myself to anyone, anywhere, at any time, it will never be all I want it to be. I can never convey all I want to about myself in a full, complete, or non-scattered way in a short spiel.
That's the problem I have with introductions: I am not a blurb.
I am a fully deformed human person. I am a young female lady. I am a person who holds various, varying thoughts and interests and opinions and qualities.
I am many, many things.
But I am not a blurb. And when I do happen to be a blurb, it's because as a human person, it is my right to be a blurb on occasion, goddammit. But I am actively and primarily not a blurb.
It is because of this that I often wonder why we insist on condensing ourselves and each other into simple blurbs. Why we feel it necessary to be able to describe one another and understand each other in the time and space of a smattering of words and a dash of punctuation. It just doesn't make sense-- we are not smatterings of words and dashes of punctuation. We are not summarizations or brief wrap-ups. We are so much more than blurbs. We are novels. We are screenplays. We are whole dictionaries full of words and definitions and explanations. We are atlases and encyclopedias. We are characters lifted from the page and into actuality.
So why we think that an introduction of ourselves consisting of a few tidbits here and some fun facts there suffices baffles me. We can't simply tell someone, "Introduce yourself," and expect to know what that person is all about from what they tell us just then. We cannot call a first encounter with another human being an introduction and expect to know what their story is all about. A person's "introduction" is really more of their dust jacket: it is a symbolic or explanatory picture of him or herself, a quick summary, a brief review from the Times. A person's introduction occurs over time. It's not an event, but a period of time. It unfolds in their words, their actions, their mannerisms, their revealing of themselves. An introduction may take an hour, a day, a week, a month. It ends when your story together can begin.
So with that, I suppose I'll give you my "introduction," my dust jacket.
My name is Sam. I want to live in New York City. I love my cat a lot. I can't decide if I want to be Tina Fey or if I want her to adopt me. I want to be a writer. I have a lot of feelings regarding Harry Potter and Andrew Garfield's face, and I yell about them frequently. I am cheerful, but enjoy whining when in situations involving math. My favorite color is purple. Lilac, specifically. I never need more books and I am always buying them. And if I'm ever forced to be a blurb, I am a SuperBlurb.
I hope you'll allow me to introduce myself to you.
