SUMMING YOURSELF UP

I've been having (you may have noticed) a few problems with making my mind up lately....

Nothing seems to sum "me" up enough to feel quite "appropriate" enough to convey whatever it might be about myself that I would really like to convey.

Choices can be so difficult to make. There are just far too many options to pick from.

Take music, for example. I'm still old enough and ugly enough to quite like having hard copies of my music on CD (or whatever other medium comes to hand), but sometimes just picking one out to listen to can take longer than the length of the moment which has become available to play it in. Some days I'm in the mood for something classical. On other days I might want to completely rock out. At other times a bit of jazz might be the order of the day, or something a little bit kitch, or just a simple pop song, or a soundtrack album...

But these are merely my little problems, and pale into insignificance against picking out which film to watch, or which book to read next, or where to go on holiday, but they are, as one book title so eloquently puts it, "Mostly Harmless" and, because they are my problems and mine alone, they cause nobody else anything like the amount of mental anxiety they can be causing me.

But recently it has become necessary to make some more public choices, ones which might be judged by both the great and the good, friends and strangers alike, and, perhaps, sum myself up in one image which will, in many ways, define the way the world looks at me, or at least, become the thing that makes people decide whether or not to look beyond the cover of the book that is me, the self same cover that they may very well choose to judge it by.

FizzBok watchers may have noticed the amount of dithering which has been going on as I have tried to update my profile for a brand new year and, perhaps, get away from the darker, more sombre, hues with which I have manifested myself so far, and allow a little bit of fresh air into all of our lives. After dabbling with a few festive choices, and one or two images from obscure but favourite films, I seem to have settled upon some bright new images to replace the dull and bleaker ones and, so far at least, they're kind of working for me.

Profile pictures aren't too bad to select once you get used to your own awful countenance… Unless you wish to remain relatively anonymous and unrecognisable to the follower in the street, you most probably either want the picture to actually look like you (or at least a recognisable piece of you), so that the long-lost acquaintances can tell that you are actually the person they thought you were, or you want to sum yourself up in the way in which you are best known to those who already know you. If, for example, you're one of those people who was popular enough to have a nickname which you yourself  used to enjoy, you might want to use an image which reflects that. However, to just grab an image of something you're interested in and say "Look out world! This is MEEEE!!!!" with a corporate logo or a footballing team's badge seems to me to be giving far too much information about far to little a slice of what makes the complicated person that you are, you.

Well, that's what I think at least. To be summed up by something which is so blatantly not you, but just one of the things which you happen to enjoy just seems to be very ordinary and lacking in a broad enough spectrum of appeal. After all, if you are just seen as a football fan, or a baker, won't that alienate those who might not know about your vast and philanthropic other life…?

"I am not just this, but I am also this… and this… and, you might be surprised to know, even this…"

To me it seems just as odd to be defining yourself by using a picture of your child, or, indeed, of someone else entirely who is famous for many things but the fact that they are not you is quite probably amongst the least of them. Perhaps this says a lot about our images of selfhood in this celebrity-obsessed culture, or that there are far too many people who believe that revealing themselves to the world as [INSERT NAME OF CELEBRITY OF CHOICE HERE] will somehow make that person be drawn towards them and wuvv them forevvah…

Then, of course, there is, god help us, the "selfie" which seems to say so much less about where we've got to as a species as we splutter headlong into the 21st century than we'd like it to. I'd like to say that we ought to acknowledge here that language has to develop as it, of course, must, but, given some of the latest offerings accepted into the O.E.D., it's hard not to believe that it is, most probably, actually regressing...

(Still, if you understood any or all of that, perhaps there is hope for us all after all…)

Choosing the cover picture was far tricker, given that it might be the space in which you tell the world a little more about what interests you. I've been through a few of those recently, but none of them have felt quite "right" as they all point to one far-too specific area of my interests without any of them being wide-ranging enough. I might like a character, or a film, or a band, but do I really want the uncaring world so see that and go "Ah! So THAT'S what he's about"…?

In the end something that is natural and shows something of the great big wide world beyond the screen seemed most apt and appropriate, which is why, on some of my social networking outlets, I now appear to he floating in heavenly clouds extracted from a photograph taken from the car as I looked out across the fog-filled valley one morning.

Personally, my constant dithering about choice is one of the many (oh so many) reasons why I could never get a tattoo; There's very little room for manouevre once you've made your mind up and, well, what if you change your mind...? After all, the things that fascinated me at eighteen years old  are nothing like the things which fascinate me now.

This can even cause problems when it comes to picking out something as banal as a ringtone. That can be a far harder choice to make than you think given, as I pointed out earlier, how my musical moods can change so abruptly. It's all very well thinking that it doesn't matter, that it's only a ringtone, but when the damned thing goes off in a crowded railway carriage, you really don't want the world thinking "Who's that idiot?" if the first word out of it is "Jitterbug!" as sung by Wham! in "Wake me up before y…" (No, I can't bring myself to say it…)

(It isn't, by the way. That's just a sad example of what it could have been...)

You could argue "So what?" I ought to be proud to display my naffness so boldly but somehow repetition can make even the greatest of masterpieces seem banal after a while, and so the choice made has to be a very careful one....

For example, I tend to like TV theme tunes, but I'm not quite so keen on what those theme tunes might say about me. Saddo? Geek? Or steeped in ironic post-modernism?

Some of my current ringtone options are themes from series like "Battlestar Galactica", "The Saint" and "Mission Impossible" but there are others that might make me want to hide under the seats if I were to be publicly humiliated associated with them if they went off unexpectedly.

In the end, something interesting but not overly familiar (a.k.a. "naff") seems to be the order of the day, and my general purpose ringtone of choice is obscure enough to be largely unrecognisable to the public at large, but, perhaps, just recognisable enough for some like-minded soul to think "Ah…!" in the highly unlikely event that they they should happen to hear it go off.

Others have been "allocated" to specific people depending upon what it is about them which most immediately sprang to mind (from an admittedly small palette), but that doesn't really help me much given that my phone is about as likely to ring as I am to become Prime Minister.

That said, perhaps the people to whom I've allocated such specific tunes might not appreciate the fact that I can sum them up with just one choice of tune, when there's so very much more about each of them going on than I could possible imagine…