So: I loved Inside Out, the Disney-Pixar film in which the five basic emotions have to help their person, a girl named Riley, navigate a move to a new city. It was great, but I confess I loved it especially because I wanted passionately to imitate it. I was a bit annoyed it had beaten me to the cute, funny story of the divided self.
Then I discovered friends doing the divided self thing brilliantly amongst themselves (some of them may read this…). What follows is less brilliant and more trying-and-probably-failing-to-be-funny, but there is some inspiration there.
In short, I am thinking about integrating personified self-components into my blog. This may not take off (remember Professor Ima Sirius-Kriddek, whose guest posts were going to revolutionize the literary canon? No? That’s because she refuses to write me a single article.*) However, Fission (that is, the fission of myself into various components) sounds hugely enjoyable and a little less demanding than convincing Professor Sirius-Kriddek to share the fruits of her genius with me. I will still be blogging about whatever I blog about—reading and writing, mostly—but I will use these personifications to illuminate what I’m saying—at least, that’s how this will work in theory.
Here are a random-ish five of the people you might meet in these efforts:
How-May-I-Help-You, a pleasant blonde, is obsequious, enthusiastic, cheerful, charming, and works hard to accommodate people’s needs and make them feel comfortable and welcome. She does not experience herself as more than occasionally insincere—she loves people. Unfortunately, she exists almost exclusively in customer service settings, though she has been known to appear in written communication as well.
Feelings Cat sleeps a lot, which is mostly for the best, because Feelings Cat has feelings, and while some of the feelings are like this:
some of the feelings are more like this:
Gleameil, the Artist, where art is defined as all creative endeavor, chose her own appearance, and so she is thin and tall, with the skin of a china doll and hair in tight ringlets of lustrous dark gold. Her eyes’ color (which can rarely be described with any single word) changes with her mood. She wears an extravagant evening gown that is a patchwork of everything that has ever taken her fancy, from autumn leaves to plastic with iridescent hearts to brocade drapes to interesting prints to woven gold and silver tinsel. Most of it is scraps and castoffs, and it represents her estimate of her own taste: a questionable hodgepodge of trash and treasure, refusing to settle on any aesthetic but inclined, overall, toward the intensely romantic.
The Moralist is an animate shadow who beats everything around him with a baseball bat. The only thing that terrifies him more than immorality is the idea of his own death, which he thinks will happen when everyone realizes that objective morality is a lie.
The Rats like to solve puzzles and run mazes and play with toys and try to learn to program (their current project)! They are clever! They are fun! Unfortunately, Feelings Cat hunts them down whenever they try to apply their skillz to Real Life ™.
*Translation: I can’t make myself read any of the bad/mediocre things “she,” by which I mean I, was supposed to comment on, let alone write semi-satirical explanations of why they are brilliant and deserve an enduring place in the hearts of book lovers everywhere.
Of Elsewhere 