Heart and Mind

Multi-Faceted

I recently saw a quote that I loved. The quote came from someone named Molly (www.molly.com) whose website I was poking around at while looking for some information about Web Standards & W3C stuff (geeky terms related to stuff I do for a living).

Molly was describing herself on the site's "About" page and she said:

"What do you do? I hate that question! I'm never sure what to answer, because people expect to hear one thing. We're all multi-faceted, and we are not our jobs."

Everything she says there is true. I often wonder how I would want or expect people to describe me if they had to do it in a line:

"Oh, Steve? He's that guy I know who..."

But then I don't know how they'd finish it, because human beings are most certainly multi-faceted creatures. They're usually not one-dimensional animals who can be described like token characters on cheesy TV shows ("He's the jock; she's the girl next door; he's the geek; she's the slut.")

In many ways, I'm glad I'm not famous, because famous people are usually typecast—or at least predominantly known—for one thing. For example, "Who is Mike Piazza?" Ask anyone who knows and they'll tell you, "He's a baseball player." And that's the end of the story, even though it doesn't speak at all to the fact that he's human and is probably a lot of other things to people who know him. Even people who would embellish that "he's a baseball player" answer would probably do so by describing more things about him that relate to baseball. I know I would.

So, who am I? Since I haven't become famous, there is no "one thing" that people would universally say about me. Still, I think there are lots of ways you could describe me and be completely right:

In my job alone, you could say I'm a graphic designer, a print professional, a consultant, a teacher, a web designer, a Macintosh user, and someone who might annoy people with his ever increasing interested in conforming to web standards and writing better mark-up (which is how I ended up on Molly's site).

And then on the familial front, you could also say he's a devoted family man, a guy who adores his wife probably even more than most, the father of an adopted child, or the father of one-time 1-pound preemie born at 26-weeks.

And even at this point we're only scratching the surface. You could also say that he's a passionate music fan, a songwriter, a drummer, a musician, a writer, a guy who doesn't read fiction, someone who doesn't watch movies very often, a teatotaler, a freak who loves sideburns, a guy who has a manic interest in the Brady Bunch and Welcome Back, Kotter, a nostalgic person, a dude who often has a beard, someone who does a lot of home improvement, a guy obsessed with time and age so much that he made up a word (thymenage) that combine the two, someone with a big heart, someone who is neurotic and worrisome, someone who values great conversation, someone who writes too many words on his blog, a person who digs cats, a guy who loves to play catch, a guy with a dry sense of humor, someone who gets bent out of shape when people misuse the word "literally" or use the word "myself" in a non-refleive manner, and the list could go on and on and on.

And these are only (mostly) good descriptions people might use! I haven't even touched upon all the rotten things people might say about me.

But the point is that I would agree to to any of those things. If someone said, "Oh, you're the guy they were telling me about who (fill in ANY description from above, no matter how ridiculous some of them are)," I would say, "Yes! That's me!"

And the larger point is that this is not about ME, but about all of us. If this post has had a sickening sense of ego and self-stroking underlying the tone, it shouldn't because I'm just a random example here from a very, very large group of people called humankind. Most people are multi-talented and multi-faceted, and a great number of them are interesting and engaging and amazing in their own ways. (And I'm fortunate to know a bunch of them.) That is, most people can't reasonably be summed up in total with just one token description. Life is not a low budget, cheesy TV show. It's the biggest, most amazing, most complex, and most sophisticated show there's ever been, and we're like the well-written cast of characters.

posted by Steve @ 11:44 PM