ME (consultant bio)
For my job, I recently had to write a biography of myself in order to help give more information about myself for project staffing. This was the end result*:
L. Lu graduated summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from the University of Pennsylvania in 2006. She was part of the Huntsman Program for International Studies and Business. L. studied Spanish and spent a semester abroad in Buenos Aires. [In addition to avid traveling, she volunteered with a church located in the slums, and conducted independent research on poverty demographics.]**
L. was involved with a variety of groups throughout college, including Intervarsity Christian Fellowship, and Propaganda Silk (a literary magazine). After her junior year, L. interned with ABC Company. She then spent two weeks in Honduras, teaching Excel and Word classes in Spanish and helping reorganize a bookstore’s inventory systems. Upon graduation, L. spent six weeks living in a lower-income neighborhood in North Philadelphia, volunteering at a homeless shelter for women and children.
In her free time, L. enjoys reading, watching movies, and writing. She is also beginning to dabble into photography and knitting.
I was quite disgusted with the result. Despite the fact that all the information in it was true, the impression that it gives bears no resemblance whatsoever to myself. As my beloved NT boyfriend would put it:
The bio makes it sound like you're an experience junkie who can't possibly be a whole person, and who is riddled with affluence-guilt and trying to compensate for it, while simultaneously feeding the experience-idolatry with a continual fodder of the exotic Other.
What disappoints me most about this bio is that it says nothing about my motivations and values. It makes it seem as though I care about poverty as some sort of ‘cool identity’. As though I did the things I chose to do because it would make me more ‘interesting’. Though I do confess that I have brought up these things in conversation in hopes of making myself slightly more interesting and more appealing to talk to, I don’t think that was ever the motive for doing those things.
But if you take the bare bone events of my life, and fail to apply the appropriate framework to interpret them, I do become a farce, an empty shell of a person…
Once again, have I been betrayed by words?
(Or rather, are words more powerful than we think they are?)***
*My name is initialed, because I’m really paranoid about having my full name online even though it's out there in the comments section. Same goes for the company I work for… That’s what Facebook is for, not my blog.
**That sentence was cut out of the final version I submitted. It was a little too disgusting for me.
***This line should be revised. Please read comments to this post.
5 comments:
I don't think it's that words are "more powerful than we think they are," so much as that images have come to be the interpretive framework for words, rather than the other way around. As such, your words evoke an "image" of a person who is "into poor people" like they might be "into Indian food" or "into punk rock." We used to say that an image was worth a thousand words, now it's more like any given word evokes a thousand stored images. Our image vocabulary has come to be immeasurably greater than our verbal one. It's inevitable then that words act as pointers toward those images, rather than images being interpreted with words, because the images are more primary and closer to "the thing itself." I don't think you can redirect those words to different "image-meanings" (e.g. psycho-visual representations) without explicitly denying that they point to the automatic stereotype (what they most often are connected to). It's a really strange reversal of primacy. That's what I think leads to this pervasive feeling of being "betrayed" by words... or feeling afraid of words, or unable to communicate in words. They've become ethereal, light, empty, shallow.
love,
your sarcastically beloved NT boyfriend
As requested oh dearly beloved boyfriend, here is my reply. (I hope we are not being obscene for engaging in online discourse. Probably just ridiculously nerdy :P)
As I wrote that section about words being too powerful, something seemed off. Your analysis/revision seems correct.
Perhaps what I was thinking, was the idea that words end up meaning things we don't want them to mean. they seem to take on a life of their own, e.g. as you've elaborated with 'image-meanings'. So maybe it's not that words are powerful, but that we have difficulty 'controlling' them, and using them. We are not masters of our words, anymore than we are masters of our lives. (ohh.. that sounded cheesy)
I guess once again, my words have failed to mean what I want them to mean.
with regards,
your extremely out-of-preference NT girlfriend
I would add that we're not masters of images either... and that maybe our being mastered by images has something to do with our loss of a facility of words.
Are you really that out-of-preference?
Facebook comment: ah, the illusion of safety.
fondly,
your favorite in-preference robot in the world
You two may be a little nerdy. But not in a bad way.
I don't think the biography is so bad. I think it only becomes bad if you assume that your motives are selfish.
My thoughts reading it were "Wow I didn't know she did all of this cool stuff," not "Wow she is shallow."
Have you read Ways of Seeing by John Berger? Knowing how much you read, you probably have. It's one of my favorite books and after reading this blog entry, you might like page 54.
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