If you don’t know me in person the point of that whole diatribe might have been lost on you, so i’ll lay it out simply.
I like girls. I’ve liked girls since i was in prekindergarten. I am more often than not head over heels for someone. That’s part of why this page is called what it’s called. But, in person i do not come off as masculine, and i am not forwardly aggressive with women. I do not turn around to look at nice asses, i do not generally leer at women in movies, and i don’t make comments about who i’d like to bang and why. Furthermore, because of various experiences i’ve had in the past, i enjoy subverting gender roles. I think it’s funny to flirt with boys at parties if there’s no one worth seriously flirting with, because i inherently know that i’m not flirting seriously. I will make comments about a man who’s attractive because i don’t feel as though i’m objectifying him by doing so. I have a wholly different operational mechanism for interacting with women.
The point was not that i want to flirt with men, or kiss men, or anything of the kind. The point was that everyone immediately assaulted me for not having kissed a man, and it made me want to slink up the stairs to lock my door behind me. If i was belittled to such a degree in that situation, what would i have been made to feel like if i had ever kissed a man? What if i had experimented once with another boy in my youth? What if instead of just feeling incredulous and belittled i felt marginalized? My friends are of a great mix of gender, race, and sexual preference, but somehow i’m still uncomfortable more times than not, and it’s not because of anything i’m doing… or not doing, as the case might be.
identity
Everyone has learned how to respect me during our time at Drexel insofar as everyone makes an assumption about my sexual preferences and gender identity and then gets themselves proven wrong (by their closeminded standards) by my flirting with girls and watching football. But, i keep them confused, much to my partial delight and eternal chagrin. I give lap-dances to boys at parties, or i mention that there are cute freshmen of both sexes to be had in the play.
People are so quick to assign labels that they often forget exactly how people really work. My friends have learned in the past two years that i generally don’t label easily and so they just leave me be, but when everyone’s sitting around drunk and loose-lipped people say things. And they hurt. A lot. Last night we were playing “I Never” and i was the only person in mixed company who had never kissed a boy — and i haven’t, ever. It’s not to say that i never would, but i am generally not attracted to men and haven’t had any reason to lay lips on another boy in anything other than a friendly manner.
First someone was incredulous… was i sure i hadn’t? Next i was told “that you lie alot anyhow.” And then a third person chimed in that it was ironic considering… “Considering what?” …. “Well, considering that you…”
Of course he didn’t say it, because no one wants to be outrightly awful to me even when their lips are loosened with liquor, but we all heard what he was saying; it was ironic because i was the gay one. The theme repeats. I mentioned that i never had sex with Selina and they all asked why not; i truthfully replied that it was because i didn’t want to be entangled with anyone on that level at that point in time, regardless of whether it was a consideration of our relationship or not. And they laughed. Of course, they said, i wouldn’t have sex with a girl… of course, they pointed out, i would have a good reason not to.
I’m getting tired of these arbitrary social boxes. Yes, my manner of speaking and gesturing has a primary association with “gay” stereotypes. Did it ever occur to anyone to ask me if i enjoy talking like i do? After talking like this for twenty years, and learning all of my tonal and indicative qualities from a group primarily composed of women, can i really change overnight? Did they ever think to ask if i would if i could? For all the haircuts i get and tight shirts that i wear, i still get boxed up neatly — even if no one normally says it it becomes quickly apparent when everyone checks their appropriateness and grabs a beer.
I am so sick of it, and so sick of myself. Everyone else is allowed to flirt with who they want to flirt with regardless of motive. Our masculine male friends get to make out with other guys as a lark at parties and never hear two words about anyone doubting their sexuality. But not me. I have struck such a precarious balance with everyone i know that all i have to do is remark that a boy is attractive and suddenly my box is tightly packed again. I have no option of flirting with people just for fun, regardless of my reasons. I could never kiss a boy, no matter what circumstantial contrivance it involved. I’m too fucking busy trying to get everyone to just judge me for who i am to begin with to do anything else.
Last night i didn’t get back to the apartment until nearly ten, having gone for well over half a day without much of a moment’s rest at all. I wearily made it up the two flights of stairs to our parlor, took a few minutes to exchange pleasantries with the roommates, mounted the third (steepest) set of stairs to my bedroom and then rolled into my bed. I was nearly out like a light while from downstairs i was being asking if i wanted to walk down the block and get some sushi, and i have no recollection of anyone returning with a meal in hand.
It occurs to me as my first week living with Linsday and Erika (and, for the moment, Jack) wears on that sharing a house with me must be a terribly surprising. Before Jack and Linsday moved into Erika’s old apartment (the Player’s House) they had been there so often that they were roommates by extension long before they were ever roommates by virtue of having a key. They were known quantities. While they surely had funny quirks about the kitchen or the bathroom or keeping tidy, the experience of sharing space with them was not a revelation of any kind.
On the other hand, there is me… alternately extroverted and introverted at parties, sporadically but dedicatedly a participant in theatre, and a music enthusiast who refuses to concede his theoretical superiority of intelligence. With every tiny interaction i have with Erika in the kitchen or while knocking on Linsday’s bedroom door i realize that anything i could be doing would be a surprise to them, because i don’t know what they might be willing to expect based on what they’ve known of me so far. Tiny things like my willingness to attack the dishes if asked, or the controlled cyclone of my room, or my quick retreat to the seclusion of loud music and a game of Snood before bed… all of them seem strange enough to me but i can’t imagine trying to fit them into the strangely perceived context of me that they must already have.
The other side of this thought process is that any given set of roommates alters one’s behaviour in a different kind of way. Kenny kept me cheery and social, Victor left me territorial and bitchy, Matt trained me to apathetic and sedentary. Each of these influences weren’t exactly surprises, since my roommates were unflappable, disrespectful, and disinterested in that order. So, i’m wondering how my new housemates are seeing me (especially Linsday, who i’ve been around the most both in and out of the apartment) and how i’ll subtly change as the year goes on.
Isn’t it funny how i’m sitting here waiting to find out who i am? Maybe it just seems amusing from the inside…
Isn’t it sort of funny that after all that talk about net identity on Sunday i’ve had mine irrevocably altered? If i thought that anyone at America Online gave two cents or ten seconds of a care towards my screenname being hacked i wouldn’t have learned anything during my time on the internet, and since i have i know that the likelihood of seeing me on aolim as KrisisPM ever again is about as much as my suddenly resubscribing to the dreaded AOL service and blogging that my new email is krisispm@aol.com.
Would you believe that this kept me up last night? Wondering what kind of bored and awful person would just yank my name out from under me just because i was a potential target since i sent them a single IM. Some people hop from name to name and from website to website and from layout to layout, and that’s all well and good for them. However, i take my identity online very seriously after all of these years, and so i am a fan of permanence. The email that everything funnels past on the way to my school account is only the third email address i’ve ever had. This webpage is only the third primary incarnation of my web presence. And, i have only ever had exactly one im name.
I’m not sure what this is supposed to inspire me to do. Is it a message from above that’s it’s time to wean myself away from virtual conversations and back onto real ones? Maybe, but the folks above seem to be ignoring that some of my best friends are mostly virtual at this point. Or, is it instead a reminder to me that nothing is ever really permanent, and that i should have alternate plans for when something i was counting on disappears from my life.
I don’t know.
Rabi just posted back-to back entries about her identity as it relates to the internet. I haven’t linked Rabi once within the last week (as is generally my habit), and i don’t want to clutter up her comments as badly as i did for some of her other identity posts, so i thought that i’d comment right here, in my own fashion.
When i first got my account on America Online it was just after Christmas; i was fourteen years old and i didn’t really understand what the internet represented past a slew of AOL chatrooms and WebCrawler, and my screen name was PeterPCM. Everything was fun and rosey, but as i slowly began to learn a little more about how things worked and about the places one’s email address could wind up i wasn’t entirely comfortable with my name being so up front. When i got off of AOL that summer my email address went through a brief transition, and by my fifteenth birthday that September i had signed on with Erols with the login Krisis.
By that time i was already deep into the continual construction of my first Geocities webpage, which started over five years ago – sometime during the summer after my Freshman year of highschool. That webpage and that identity stayed wholly separate from myself for years; because my email address has stayed so consistent over the years i wound up establishing an actual identity to go with it. There have people who i’ve met and lost touch with who never knew me as anything other than a nebulous androgynous entity named Krisis, and i loved it. After the first incarnation of my webpage finally ended i created a new webpage that was more contingent upon my identity due to my songs and voice appearing all over it, but people still wound up asking me if i was a girl or a boy after i sent them there to answer their own question. For all of my pre-college summer i posed as a female character in an online roleplaying game and never once had my identity questioned or revealled. I was content and secure.
However, in college my treasured anonymity began to accumulate chinks in its armour despite my solid facade. All during Freshmen year my web identity became more and more entwined with my presence on Shafted, where Krisis was my posting handle. I couldn’t very well be anonymous and androgynous while talking about my own life and friends, and so i let down my guard and finally owned up to things like my sex, age and location. I still admantly refused to use my first name while ‘in character’, which was evidenced by most Shafted posters not knowing what to call me when they actually met me in real life. And, otherwise, things stayed aproximately the same.
Everything changed three hundred and sixty days ago, when i plugged my ftp information into blogger and began to deluge the internet with an amplified version of my interior monologue. Immediately i ran into conflicts… i didn’t mention my name anywhere in the blog and my ‘about’ page was deliberately vague about my identity, but to have a ‘blog’ i needed to have an identity and a voice of my own. Slowy but surely i crept into my online presence and edged some of the pieces that had been there as placeholders for facets of my own personality that i had been protecting, and at the same time i held on to facets of my internet voice that were routed deeper in my own self than anyone would’ve ever suspected. Despite these changes, i was still resistant, only mentioning my name sparingly in the context of songwriting and in conversations about me until it was nearly 2001; a search of the archives mostly turns up unending praise of Peter Mulvey. Even as my name finally spread through the internet through things like SurvivorBlog2 and Amy‘s mentions of me i persisted in signed comments and emails with ‘Krisis’ rather than ‘peter’.
As of now i’m just confused. Comments at LYD, Wockerjabby, UnNarrator, and Crezappy all alternate my monkier with my actual name depending on what information the cookies on my computer decided to remember. Emails to the notify list get my name, but emails to Tori lists still get Krisis despite the fact that Outlook on my work computer lists “Peter” as my reply name. And, because i send so much email at work, my student address has been the one most ‘internet people’ i talk to are seeing rather than my alias name.
Where have i wound up? Full circle from the start, i suppose, seeing as an email from me typically reads as From: “Peter [pcm22]” (which isn’t a far cry from “PeterPCM”). My “identity” is another matter entirely… more than four years playing the role of someone who wasn’t quite myself has left a lasting impression on my narrative voice on the internet whether i like it or not. Since i stopped writing fiction around when my first webpage saw its prime i literally have a gap in my personally recorded narratives where the only ones i wrote were for the internet – meaning that my internet voice literally usurped my typical one on the whole in my writing. In fact, now it even reaches far into term papers, official letters, and reports at the office.
Admittedly, it still feels weird sometimes to talk about my hair or my weight or to appear on my webcam, but i think at this point i have irrevocably entangled myself with whoever i had become in the same way what that i had become hijacked my own written communications. So, now my split personalities have been reigned back in to one manageable boy, and i’m left wondering what this newly merged boy’s real voice is on this log … the frantically paced, parenthetically snarking, self-derisive narrator of a year ago – or this newfound one complete with at-length reflections, somewhat credible grammar and syntax, and through-composed essays.
I suppose part of the fun of reading me must be watching me try to decide. Or, at least, part of the fun of writing me certainly is.