I have been thinking of years gone past.
When I was in high school, I read Woolf's
Orlando as part of a course on postmodern
literature. I am not giving away any secrets when I tell you that the
book is about a character who magically changes sex in the middle of
the story. Many speculate that it was written as an extended
love letter for Vita Sackville-West, Woolf's lesbian lover. It is a
marvelous book, deliciously comical, and it has shaped many of my
current attitudes. Books do that to teenagers.
Our teacher assigned us a very natural project: write an essay of what
you would do if the next day you woke up as a member of the opposite
sex. The question has been interesting at least as far back as the
ancient Greek myth of Teiresias in Western European tradition. Being
the radical teenager that everyone at least once is, I wrote that
nothing essential would be different. Short of lovemaking or other
natural functions, my
sudden gender-bender miracle would not affect my life in any
fundamental way. I refused to believe that menstrual cycles truly
altered anyone's mood. It's all social construct. Much of it can be
blamed on Cosmopolitan. I would still be me, only a little different
on the outside. Radical teenagers are like this.
This position has become more and more difficult to defend as
time goes by. I still believe that fundamentally we are all humans
with modifications, but now I think that the surface differences aren't
really all that superficial at all.
In our day-to-day lives, those of us without the stamina to be a
radical teenager forever will immediately present three characteristics to
the world. As soon as anyone glances at our face, they can tell in all
but exceptional cases our approximate age, whether we were born with
or without a vagina, and guess fairly accurately where in the world
we come from (and hence have a sketch of our cultural background,
accurate or not). These are the surface parameters that first determine
our position in society. We can rebel later against them if we make
the effort. But they have the first word. In the primordial world of
the common chat room, it is to be expected that "28/f/Mauritius" will
be the first utterance in preparation for cybersex.
You see, humans are very smart creatures. Based on a few scant details
they are able to paint a bigger picture. This ability is known as
generalisation, and along with our language, forms part of a core of
characteristics that define humans. From generalisation comes
knowledge; from knowing that exceptions generally happen comes
wisdom. Humans are also very complex social creatures. Our networks of
family, friends, lovers, and acquaintances are vast and
intricate. This is why we are so quick in recognising someone's age,
sex, and origin: we need to know to a first approximation how to
relate to this person, where and in which of our networks will they
fit. Our relationship may change with time; at the moment it has to
begin somewhere. I can apologise later if my initial generalities
misplaced you within my social networks.
Imagine how difficult it would be to get along if we were unable to
generalise. Each person would be a completely different experience to
us. I present Sydney to you. Say hello. Strike up a conversation. Does
Sydney like to talk? Should I flirt with Sydney? Should I address
Sydney formally or conversationally? Is Sydney of a higher or lower
social status? Confound it, which pronoun should I use for Sydney? Let's
make Sydney a "she". Will she even speak my language, I'll ask if I'm
aware of the question. Does she know the same people I do, the same
cultural references? What shall we talk about? I have no idea what to
say, nor even how! You see how this can be
distressing. Now when I
tell you that Sydney is my five-month-old son, you might adopt a
goo-goo tone of voice, make faces at him, and pull on his toes, if
that's your mode of saying hello to a baby.
So it goes, and Sydney's age more than anything has determined who he
is to you and how you will relate to him. Sex will become more
important once Sydney can walk and choose his toys. Location will be
something that determines the languages Sydney can speak and the ideas
he will acquire. As for what else Sydney will grow up to be, who
knows. Three properties have given Sydney a mold to grow
into, a very flexible mold, but mold nonetheless. Who will Sydney be?
Everyone is asking the same question.
Now ask yourself, wouldn't you like to know how much of you is you,
and how much is
ruled by the ASL triumvirate? Perhaps not. Many people are comfortable
being who they are, and have better things to worry about. Your
identity is strongly shaped some time in your teenage years, sometimes
a little earlier, sometimes a little later. After a little
soul-searching, however long it may take and whenever it may be,
almost anyone finds their societal niche and grows into it. But on the
other hand, I for
one did want to measure the extent to which I am shaped and how much
I built by myself.
I was intensely curious to find out who I am and why. I still am
curious, and I don't feel like a teenager anymore. By now I have a
very secure answer. I know who I am, but the question of how I got
to be the way I am and not anything else is still interesting. Does
this much catch your attention? I'd be surprised if it didn't, at
least a little, or if you did not have an answer ready, even a short
one. Why are you who you are?
When I was a teenager, the sex part of the whole question was the most
captivating for me. Forgive me for neglecting other aspects of the
problem. You know the almost obsessive nature of sexual inquiries in
adolescents. During my investigations, I enrolled in a course on feminist
theory during my first year at university. I wanted to ponder
sex and gender, and I did not want to hear the answers that the gay
and lesbian university groups had to offer; they're too radical, too
much of the same teenager that I was. No, I wanted to listen to a
professor yak about it, have someone explain to me something of the
nature of human relationships around the whole girl/boy issue. I was
not disappointed and learned several things. I finally paid close
attention to many secondary traits that our society derives from
intersexual relations. The different languages men and women will use,
how men also face societal pressure to fit into their gender roles,
that at any time to express any form of weakness is to be womanly and
hence to lose social status. I was fascinated like someone
transfixed by gazing at violent flames when I read Andrea Dworkin's
account of just exactly why women everywhere had to struggle with a
lower social position. She was radical in the etymological sense of
the word: she wasted no time in going to the root of the matter. Women
have a hole in which men fuck them, she said, and this invasion of
their bodies deprives them of their humanity. That's terrible, do
you really believe that, Andrea? Then Sojourner Truth
reminded me that it is not enough to reduce the problem to a question
of sex, but that race and social class complicate matters
immensely. She also told me, like the Marxist feminists did, that the
ones who defend an existing equality are the same ones who already are
more equal than others.
And so on. I suppose this was a bit of an
awakening in me. I was suddenly much more keenly aware of sex and
gender than ever before, and perhaps even a little hypersensitive to
their interplay. Sure enough, Sandra Lee Bartky wrote that to come
in touch with feminism is to adopt a radically different
consciousness. The first symptom of a feminist consciousness is a
paranoia towards all gender relations, and since everyone has a
gender, a paranoia towards all of society. Did he crack that joke
because he is trying to reassert his male dominance or because he
simply is a funny guy? Is she being motherly because she has been
subjugated by the male-dominant society into a position of
subservience or does she like to provide care out of a free choice
she made and because she derives pleasure from it? No human action is
free from a gender-based analysis, it seems.
Such were the thoughts of my late youth. And along came a spider web.
The Internet
I began my excursions into the world of online communities about five
or six years ago. I realised from the very beginning the great
opportunity that this was: I could now be whoever I wanted to be
thanks to the anonymity of the binary flux. If I wanted to
engage in soul-searching, I had now golden opportunities to do so. I
began to create online personae. The first few were remarkably similar
to the one I have created for my whole life in the real world, as the online world calls ordinary life, and thus unremarkable. I answered the a/s/l
question at the merest insinuation with no second thought. The
Internet seemed like a safe haven, a sandlot for play-acting our real
selves within a controlled environment. I occasionally lied a bit about
myself and expected others to do the same. After all, we all knew none
of this is real.
My relationship with online communities changed the first time I
actually met someone I only knew from the chat rooms. We had sex the
first day we met face-to-face, after almost six months of online
courting. This was incredibly unusual for me. I really am not that
kind of netizen (remember that word?). The relationship with that
person soured very quickly, when we realised just what a silly fantasy
we had both constructed online. You must be understanding; the
courting medium was as new to us two as it was to everyone else. After
that relationship fouled up my real life, it finally hit me. The
Internet can be very real if you let it. Reveal too much, get involved
too much, and crossing through the monitor's looking glass becomes
child's play. The Internet is not a harmless toy. Be more careful next
time.
I did not leave online communities, although I did avoid the ones
where that person had been. I found several niches of increasing
sophistication. Soon communities that were just there for the novelty
of online chat got boring and tired. Messages such as "25/m/CA anyone
wanna chat?" very quickly cease to attract. I started to drift to
communities with focus, places where people would talk about something
else than their stats. It is only natural, I think, that people who
find value in communicating with random strangers will soon begin to
discriminate and talk to those who have something interesting to
say. Not so random strangers anymore.
As an online community becomes more and more focused, a small miracle
happens: it becomes more real. Soon real relationships start to form
between people. Friendships bloom, tendrils of acquaintance seep
across the web, enmities fester. Personal details steadily
accumulate across the servers. People get smarter as a community
concentrates around a common topic. And most importantly of all,
nobody has time anymore for the accursed a/s/l question. Online
communities could be more than mere toys. They were no longer the
sandlots for experimental role-play, but now attractive societies of
their own.
I don't remember when it happened, perhaps two or three years ago, but
suddenly I realised that now I had the means for serious
experimentation with that question of my teen years. Since nobody was
asking anymore, why bother answering? Now I had a real chance to
answer some of the questions about identity from my teen years, in an
almost academic manner, in a quasi-controlled environment with myself
as a test subject. How exciting! I would discover facts about people and
myself that cannot be obtained in any other way. This was the
beginning of a new online persona.
None of the first online communities I tried my experiment at first
were all that satisfying. Either the assembled populace wasn't diverse
enough to get a variety of reactions, or it wasn't 'mature' enough to
avoid eventually blurting out some version of the a/s/l question. I
wanted diversity, many ideas all at once; I wanted to develop several
of my interests. I need a well-rounded community, something very real,
something with actual content and credible people. It would be close
to real life except that nobody can look at my face and classify me at
first glance. They would have to classify strictly based on the
information I decided to share. I needed a very special kind of
community for my experiment.
My readers have recognised the only possible resolution.
I discovered Everything2 sometime in 2001, after it had matured well
away from Everything1 and settled into a form similar to the one it is
today. Back then I did not realise the full potential of the site. I
created a user, posted fewer than six writeups, and read some of the
comments I got in return. Hm, looks like an online community like any
other, but with a gimmick. Nothing for me here. Let's move along.
Around late 2002, about a year later, I came back to the site, in a
not uncommon gesture of visiting old places I frequented. For
unfathomable reasons, the place seemed fresh and new and I began to
see something unique about it. I started to read, innocently
enough. Hm, there's a link here. Well, this is completely unrelated,
yet somehow relevant to the previous text. It's like a train of
thought. How wonderful. I gravitated towards the mathematics. I saw
someone by the name of ariels had contributed quite a
bit. Linguistic nodes, full of Gritchka himself, of course. It also
seemed that everyone had something to contribute about their sexual
experiences. Well, that's interesting too. Let me read it all!
It wasn't long before the urge arose to contribute to this pool of
information and community. I remembered the past self I had created
here and did not want to go back to it. I did not understand nearly
enough when I used that previous username. It was also a very dull
username; all five writeups I posted were only on one
subject. Well-rounded is better. I also saw that community seeps through
the nodegel (I picked up the lingo very quickly), so that besides
choosing noding material I would also have to create a new username.
This is where my past musings about identity finally kicked in. I
wanted to create a new persona, something flexible, one with which I
can play, share, and learn. This persona would be half-toy,
half-reality. Boundless possibilities ahoy!
As I was deciding on the character of this persona, I made up a few
rules for myself. First of all, never answer a direct age/sex/location
question. In fact, obfuscate the question as much as possible. This
was for a number of reasons. The first one is the
experimentation I discussed above, the second is that I knew my
contributions to the database were going to be judged, and I wanted
them to be judged on their own merits. I did not want anyone to
believe that my understanding of mathematics is inadequate because I'm
a woman, or that my point of view about feminine themes in a novel is
invalid because I'm a man.
The second rule was that I would never lie
about myself or anything else. I had learned my lesson, and I knew that I would
probably in due time get attached to people and would like to meet
them face-to-face (this has already happened). Lying would interfere
with that.
No. Obfuscation, ambiguity, skirting the issue, evident concealment;
those are all very fine. They were necessary if I wanted to adhere to
Rule Number 1. But no lies. To this day I am very pleased with how
well I have managed to uphold this rule. It will make things easier
once I attend a nodermeet. The charade will fade after the nodermeet,
but nobody will get hurt this time.
The third rule was to diversify. Here I have a problem in that I am
strongly inclined to write about mathematics, and mathematics are very
much a masculine thing to do. By sheer numbers, if you'll pardon the
expression, men overwhelm women in mathematical environments. Of the
seventy-odd professors in the department where I earned my
undergraduate degree, for example, only two were women. I did not want
to conceal my gender
only to node piles of mathematics and have everyone believe that I'm
male just because I do mathematics. Remember what I said about wisdom
in acknowledging exceptions? Yes, well, wisdom is hard to come by in
people. That's why they call it wisdom.
So from diversification came my version of the covenant: at most 50%
mathematics. I haven't broken Rule Number 3 either, which pleases me. I
only have 18 nodes, 19 with this one, and when I look back at them, I
am happy with their contents. They only reflect a very selected
glimpse of me, but an important part of me. Pauca sed
matura indeed!
All these things I decided before I decided on a username. I wanted to
create a believable persona. I wanted the username to have meaning,
and, of course, be gender-neutral. I
remembered reading about transform and her own adventures in
gender-concealment and ambiguity. Being an admirer of transform's
work, I decided that a username that conveyed a sense of fluidity or
change would is an excellent idea. This was my first requirement for a
username.
Names are important. They of course define nothing. They do, however, clothe
a person. Every time I divulged any piece of information on E2, my
username would be attached to it. It would be a word that would be
repeated a lot. It therefore had to be short. transform's
two-syllable word of Latin roots was already too long for
me. Anglo-Saxon words with their penchant of being monosyllabic are so
much more attractive. So Switch was my first idea, similar notion to
transform. Two problems: it was already taken, twice, in fact. One
by another E2 user and another by the character who dresses in white
in the very famous first Matrix movie. I therefore switched to Swap
and stayed there.
Here came another problem. Rule Number One requires me to conceal as
much as possible my cultural background. Swap is a very English word
with a very English meaning. Ideally, my username would be
gender-neutral, culture-neutral, and have some sort of meaning. These
are strict requirements. I gave up on having a language-neutral (hence
culture-neutral) word with meaning, because short of inventing new
words, that's impossible. New words would of course only have meaning
for me, which would be no meaning at all. My solution was to make it
seem as if Swap were a shortening for something else. I've sometimes
used the name Digana elsewhere. It is a contraction of
Digital-Analogue, a dichotomy that fascinates the modern
age. I also like it because it uses phonemes that are
very common in the world languages, yet is not a word in any language
I know. The final 'a' is a plus, because in several Western European
languages proper names ending in 'a' are often female, while in Slavic
languages such as Russian many male nicknames end with 'a'. Rule One
is fully satisfied with Digana.
Then came Swap. Hiding its Anglo-Saxon meaning would be a little more
difficult. And there is that troublesome 'w' in there that is so
Germanic. To hide its meaning I would extend it. I already had
Digana. And Swap. Well, someone who exchanges between meatspace and
cyberspace would be
a Digana Swapper. But just for a little obfuscation, let's make it
Digana Swapar. I googled both words separately, and each appears in
the net. It seems that 'Swapar' may be a word somewhere in Sri
Lanka. Good enough for me; I picked phonemes common enough to appear
in a language somewhere.
All this leaves now is Rule Number 2. No falsehood. But if someone asked me
for my name, what would I say? Because, you understand, people
eventually ask about your name online. Here I decided to play a little
game. I would never refer to "Digana Swapar" as my real name. No, when
I signed up, E2 asked me for my Real Name (tm). The pomp and ceremony
of their question means they're aware of its sensitivity, really an
innocuous question in real life, where
people only ask for your name. So "Digana Swapar" became my Real
Name (tm). If the trademarked name doesn't alert you to
concealment afoot, (after all, you know that when a company is
marketing a product, they will always lie, ever so slightly) then you
are simply a little confused about how the world works. I didn't
lie. Digana Swapar is a Real Name (tm) I made for myself for the
reasons above. I acknowledge it in my homenode and forever pay no more
attention to it, and no one else does either. Thereby my conscience rests.
Methodology
A little introspection of your life, whether it be the online life or
the real one, will reveal the difficulty of following my three
rules. You must not reveal your age, sex, gender, nor any clues
relating to the culture you come from. You must never lie. And you
must share as much information and as diverse as possible as you
can. The rules contradict each other. Is it clear why? Because
information is strongly interconnected, if I may so preach to the
choir. If I talk about the things I know, eventually people will want
to find out why I know them, and where I learned them. And this will
provide glimpses of my a/s/l. Everyone bleeds information. Being
selective of what gets shared is a Herculean task.
Location and Culture
I was at first too ambitious. I wanted to leave open the possibility
for me to be from anywhere on the planet. Well, there were a few
problems with that. First of all, I clearly have regular and
affordable Internet access. That restricts the possibility of being a
noder from Cameroon, for example. Second are the hours which I log in
to the site. I was not about to log in during the odd hours after
midnight only to give the impression that I am from a time zone from
which I am not. So there I gave clues as to my time zone. I marked
this off as necessary evils. I could still leave open the possibility
of being a Cameroonian who had emigrated to a developed country with
easy Internet access.
But concealing culture is next to impossible, I have realised. I first
had to contend with the fact that I speak English fluently. Well, that
is not so unusual in the world now that English has become a lingua
franca. I could simply be an educated English-speaking individual
somewhere in the world; that I am educated is evidently a piece of
information I want to share. Idiomatic expressions are more difficult
to conceal. Lifts and elevators are the same thing but are found in
different countries. And English spelling is not standardised across
countries; I had to pick one. I reckoned that British spellings are
used in more countries than the American spellings, even if by fewer
speakers. I ordinarily spell mostly the British way anyways given a
few lapses due to obvious contact with Americans, so this would not be
a great problem.
In this manner I had to watch my language if I wanted to conceal my
location. Very early on I found the chatterbox and spent quite some
time there; I still do. In the beginning I watched very carefully
everything I said to make sure that my language choices would not
reveal the origins of my English. In due course I relaxed and used
idiomatic expressions freely. It was simply too much of an effort to
consistently speak in a location-neutral fashion; I was not even sure
that I was doing it correctly. There are too many idiomatic
expressions in the English-speaking world to know them all. The
Internet nor the mass media have succeeded in standardising English
across boundaries, nor even within boundaries. So here I was spilling
information about me, by the simple act of saying anything in the catbox.
That's just the beginning of location obfuscation. There's also the
matter of having to confuse the cultural references one gives. For
full obfuscation, there are two choices: either you use as many and as
varied cultural references, or you use none at all. Neither path is
easy. I thankfully never have watched television that often, so that I
can truthfully say I know very little about television's melting
pot. Movies are usually safe too, because they often get
subtitled or dubbed into other languages and countries. Books are also
quite safe so long as I did not discuss the books of a particular
country or author too intently over others. Discussing books in one
language that had not yet been translated into English is also
suspect. You get the idea of what is necessary.
I had to be careful about one more thing: political opinions. Few
things are as telling of one's cultural background as the political
opinions one holds. Let alone which side of the issue you are on;
simply the issues you are willing to discuss will reveal something
of the quandaries you have been pondering lately and the place
from which you come. This one is simple: since discussions of politics
are unpleasant to begin with, I simply will not express any political
opinion nor engage in any political discussion. In this respect I have
also lapsed a little, but not too much, I hope.
I would like to emphasise one point again. Culture permeates
everything. E-V-E-R-Y-T-H-I-N-G. Nothing is more difficult to
obfuscate that one's cultural background; the best that can be done if
you're bicultural (or maybe tricultural, polycultural?) is to express
one of the
cultures you know and hide the other; perhaps bewilder between the two
(three, more...) you know. After all, you do speak at least
one language, don't you? This was the facet of the a/s/l question I
first got too lazy to properly conceal. I simply had to express
culture if I wanted to express any other information. Here is a nice
exercise: try to find a text written or translated to English, if you
will, from which you cannot guess anything at all about the author's
cultural background. If you do find it, it won't be a very interesting
text.
Sex and Gender
To be frank, I had the most fun coming up with inventive ways to
conceal my sex. By the way, it is high time I reminded my readers of
the difference between the two: sex is biological; gender is the
social construct, and the difference between the two is a fascinating
subject for philosophical discussion that prompted me to create Digana Swapar in the first place.
Perhaps you'll be surprised to hear that concealing my sex was not as
difficult as concealing my cultural background. Probably because gender roles are less variable across cultures than other aspects of human interaction. I will not dwell on this point. For now, I will discuss some of my methods. They really are simple.
Take all the qualities you think of as typically masculine; imagine
the most stereotypical boy possible. This is what may result:
confident, self-assured, rational or self-proclaimed rational,
imposing, often horny or sexually predatory. Now do the same thing for
the most stereotypical girl: leaning towards the emotional,
manipulative, nurturing, sensitive, mediative, sexually hungry but
usually passive. Ugh, it disgusts me just to write these stereotypes
down, but it's a necessary first step to recognise them. Now express
both of them in yourself at the same time, or alternate between one
and the other, in varying degrees of intensity. As far as expressing a
gender-ambiguous person, this is all that is necessary at first.
It helps if you have a balanced set of stereotypes and if you pay close
attention yourself to how people interact based on gender. This ties
back in with the paranoia coming from a heightened feminist
consciousness. Make careful note of the subtler aspects of gender
interactions, such as how girls will try to reach a common ground in a
discussion, everyone-can-be-correct situation, whereas boys strive for
the I-am-right situation. Observe that unless a relationship has
reached high maturation, boys and girls find it awkward to be friendly
with each other unless there is at least a sprinkling of flirting
along for social lubrication, usually an unacknowledged
sprinkling. Forget the sexual revolution and gender equality; most
women still know home and hearth better, and men still dominate in the
public sphere. If you really want to be able to confuse the majority
of the people about your sex, you need this consciousness of the
current status quo. Revolution is exhausting.
Because we practically never have to contend with someone without a
definite third-person singular pronoun, someone will
eventually associate "he" or "she" to you, or maybe both if she or he
is careful. Here the real fun starts. Whenever someone assigned me a
pronoun, in almost all situations quite innocently to be sure, I
often /msged them with something like "Ah, interesting. You think I'm
female/male?", and see what happened. Never contradict or confirm;
simply observe. The reactions are indeed interesting. I will discuss
momentarily these and other observations further down.
Age and Maturity
I have not said much explicitly about the importance of age in our daily
interactions. It is crystal clear, however, that age determines much
of an individual's role in society. Usually we are content with
our position as far as age goes, because if we are too young
to be allowed a certain privilege, we know that we'll obtain it when
we get older, whereas the satisfaction of knowing we once enjoyed a
privilege when young keeps us from complaining too much of how we are
deprived of it in our later years. Of course I am making broad
generalisations here, so let's recognise the exceptions. The young are
eager to grow up; the elders long for their past. But at
least with respect to age we cannot say that humans have an artificial
or unjust social structure. Everyone gets to grow older and live
through different experiences appropriate to his or her age.
In the Internet, e2 in particular, age is not as important for social
recognition as maturity is. The two are correlated, of course, but
neither determines the other. As far as cyber interactions are
concerned, age modifies the sort of life experiences people can share,
and the projected maturity affects the response others will give. It
is unfortunate that just as in real life, prejudices about age will
also affect people's response towards the presentation of any piece of
information. For this reason I also wanted to muddle the age question.
Age obfuscation is also relatively simple provided you do it
consistently. Simply be careful with the personal details you provide
about your life. If you talk about your recent divorce and the custody
of your two children, you probably are not a teenager anymore (I
hope), and if you talk about the recent events in your high school, I
would like to believe that you are not middle-aged either. Concealing
age will involve the shrouding of many aspects of your day-to-day
affairs, just as concealing culture and location required paying
attention to the details you revealed from your upbringing. Actually,
the two are strongly related because cultural is as much a temporal
parameter as it is related to location. Many of the above remarks
about culture apply to age as well.
It was also difficult for me to consistently be ambiguous about my
age, so very early on I decided to settle on being young but
undetermined. I was probably no older than 35, I decided, and left it
at that. On the other hand, because I wanted to be taken seriously, I
decided against being deliberately childish (Except in the catbox.
Everyone is allowed to be a child in the catbox). I therefore
recommend expressing as much maturity as possible at all times. I
cannot give any recommendations on how to fake this because maturity
and wisdom cannot be falsified. Just act your age, so to speak, but
don't tell us about it. Hardly can this hinder the purpose of our
experiment.
The experiment is over. Tomorrow I shall take a bus to New Jersey to
meet yclept. The day after that, there will be several other noders
I shall see in the face as well. Most of them already know much about
me. All of them will know my three statistics. So what have I learned?
I learned first that I was unable to carry out my project to its full
completion. I could not socialise with a large group and at the same
time remain as faceless as I wanted to be. After a while, I snapped
and had to confess my full identity to someone. I needed a
confidant. Secrets are easier to keep when shared. I do believe that
this experiment is too complicated to be handled by a person
alone. Thank you to the two or three noders who sat with me on the
translucent end of the one-sided mirror. Your help was invaluable in keeping me sane throughout.
I learned something about cultural interactions. Nobody ever seemed to
doubt that I belong to the English-speaking world. I suppose this
was to be expected. To be frank, I do not belong to the English
speaking world alone, but I do know much of it. The Americans usually
recognised me as not one of them, first for the obvious different
spelling; the British also recognised that I was not one of them. I
think it would have been very difficult to fool either party unless I
was prepared to involve in deliberate deception, which I was not. So
there you have it. You recognise your own. The Australians, friendly
and wonderful lot that they are, never for once told me that I might
be one of them either. On the other hand, I understand Canadians
because they understand
me too. I immediately felt allegiance to them, whether they be
anglophones or francophones. Living in Montréal has given me an
appreciation for the bicultural nature of Canada. A very rough
appreciation, because another thing I have learned is that Canada is
very varied, although that's not something I learned from e2. And
lastly, I have not met any Mexicans from Mexico City, so
I cannot tell you if they would have recognised me as one of their own
either. It's been four years since I've left my hometown, and I've
always been bicultural to begin with, perhaps even tricultural now, so
I have my doubts that Mexicans would know me. I am too a part of them,
truth be told. I did not interact much with people from other parts of
the world to know what opinions they may have formed of Digana Swapar.
I am very pleased with my evaluations as far as gender goes. As far as
I can tell, roughly half of the noders believed me female, the other
half male. Part of the reason I wanted to indulge in this whole affair
is that I wanted to test my own understanding of each gender. I think
I passed my test. I know how to act like a boy or a girl. And I also
ran into occasional trouble.
I am a bit flirtatious. So flirted I did, and it got me in trouble
sometimes. Especially with the boys. It was not altogether infrequent
for boys to /msg me responsive flirting, and I was usually able to
manoeuvre around it. Not interested, thank you. I am a straight male
(This is one reason I have avoided genderqueer questions
throughout. They complicate matters immensely.) But I never flat-out
rejected anyone like that. A few times, some boy would decide
that I was the babe of their dreams, apparently, and that's when
things got a little icky. Sorry, I'm not. But this is really not as
serious as it sounds. Boys will think that about many girls, and they
heal from rejection easily enough, often being used to it. I don't
think any serious damage has been done here, nor that anything ever
was unethical. Boys will fall in love with whatever fantasy they are
able to craft. Lord knows it has happened to me too. It really isn't
that bad, and we get over it.
It was lots of fun to be able to interact with women without that
uncomfortable threat of sexual predation. I could be friendly, funny,
even a little coquettish, and not be immediately put at a distance
because it did not seem as if I were a horny boy trying to get down
their pants. So I managed to engage in a little bit of sisterhood, and
just a bit. When someone asked me if I wanted to be in the ninjagirls,
I politely refused. When they added me anyways, I asked to be
removed. Not because I am uncomfortable or insecure about my own sex
and sexuality. Rather, because it is a usergroup for women, and
because I am not one and decided not to lie about it. Yes, put me
against a wall, and I have to confess. I am not a woman. I'm a guy.
yclept wanted me to hide my sex until the very end, until the
nodermeet. I think this may have been a little dangerous. So to
whomever reads this before this weekend's nodermeet, be
prepared. Swap's name is Jordi. That's Catalan for George. Pleased to meet you.
I could never fully hide the fact that I'm young, nor did I try very
hard to do so. Anyways, on the Internet, everyone is in their teens or
twenties unless otherwise specified, right? Right, so am I. Only once
did anyone believe that I was over thirty, and that was only because
they confused my level of mathematics to be PhD level. Shucks, I'm
flattered, but no. It's just vanilla undergraduate mathematics. I
haven't even started my masters yet. So you shouldn't be surprised now
to hear that I'm twenty-two, born August first nineteen
eighty-one. May this colour your interpretation of any of my
other writeups in whatever fashion it will.
The game is over, and game it has been. I hereby kill Digana
Swapar. Swap may remain, as simply another name for Jordi. But my
persona can only exist by being undetermined. Rumpelstiltskin forfeits the game
when his name is spoken out-loud, so does Digana. Thank you all for
playing. I had lots of fun. I hope you did too.
My relationship with e2 forthwith is definite. I shall continue
noding. I will reach level 2 and beyond. I still have two rules to
obey. No lies, and diversify. But I
cannot continue to be an amorphous and anonymous person from
nowhere. I have many contexts. They determine much of which is me. It
is time you know my surface parameters. I
thank you for the patience you have had in getting to know me. After
all, aren't they all GTKY nodes in the end? I insist that's why we're all in e2 to begin with.