The short answer:
Just call me QM for now.
The long answer:
I do not mix together the food on my dinner plate. I do not fold my vegetables into my rice and stir in gravy. It took me several years to accept the concept of curry.
Likewise, I like to keep different facets of my life separate. I like to control what people know about me. Luckily, since I’m a private person, most people I run into on a daily basis don’t know me that well. It’s either their fault for not asking or my fault for not imposing it upon them. Either way, it keeps my nights free.
The other day someone told me that he had heard a “disturbing rumor” about me. And it was disturbing, not so much in content but because the only people who should have known about it were some old college friends who now live two hundred miles away. The shortest chain by which he could have heard it was four people long.
I was unnerved. My worlds were colliding.
Call me neurotic, but if anyone I knew ever discovered that I was writing this blog, I would be quite mortified. (Consequently, if you ever find out my secret identity, you now have the perfect way to mortify me.) And so in the interest of preventing this from ever happening, I am going to remain anonymous. But since it’s hard to communicate with someone without a name (”Hey… you…”) I’ll be signing all my posts with QM. Those aren’t my initials, they’re just two completely random letters that I picked that certainly don’t stand for anything.
But that doesn’t stop me from revealing a little about myself. For now, I’ll give you two options. I’m either a twenty-three year old male graduate student at a prestigious American university, studying a subject that has been termed a “cultural anathema,” or I’m a twenty-six year old female aspiring artist living in a small suburb, currently working in a store that sells overpriced kitsch to out-of-towners. Take your pick. (Whichever one seems more glamorous, I’m probably the other one.)
How is it, then, that I feel qualified to answer any question that is thrown at me? Easy. I don’t. Chances are that if you ask me a difficult question, I will not know exactly what to say. But I promise to try my best, and how often can you ask a question and know that the person you’re asking is actually considering it? Take that question, for example.
So if you want to know more about me and how I think, leave me a question, easy or hard, serious or inane. Otherwise I’ll have to start talking to myself, and then the people around me will start asking questions.
Cheers,
-qm
