4 x 4 Secrets About Me, And Why I’m Uncomfortable Talking About Myself

Over the weekend, my friends Peter Kim and BL Ochman independently tagged me “It” in two blog games (called memes). The object of each is for the tagged writer to reveal personal bits about themselves that you wouldn’t know otherwise, and then to tag other blog authors to similarly spill their guts.

 

BL (who had been tagged by Toby Bloomberg) asked for “8 secrets,” and Peter (himself tagged by Shiv Singh) asked for four details about four topics of esoteric “things about me”; Peter called it a 4 x 4, which I kind of liked.

 

Truth is, I’ve been tagged lots of times in the past. But I’ve rarely played along, in part because I didn’t have the right forum: I feel a little weird talking about myself on the MarketingProfs group blog.

 

Or so I thought. Now that I have my own blog here, I’m surprisingly just as uncomfortable.

 

Yet, it gnaws at me every time I ignore a tag—I feel like I’m the pouty kid waiting to intercept the ball so I can tuck it under my arm and head for home. So, this time, I decided to play along.

 

Better yet, I decided to turn this into my own meme, combining Peter’s and BL’s requests into a single post. Three of the four topics are (mostly) from Peter, but the last is all mine.

 

4 x 4 Secrets

 

4 of the Weirdest Places I’ve Been

1. Yerevan (Armenia) Shouka: Amazing food market where the locals shop. But I couldn’t speak the language and I didn’t know the social mores of an incredibly interesting but (for a Westerner) often impenetrable culture.

2. Wal-Mart Supercenter, in a now-forgotten sprawling Florida town: Again, where the locals shop. I could speak the language, but I couldn’t have felt more out of place than if I were in Yerevan.

3. Santa’s Village: A Christmas-themed amusement park in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. The giant elves, Yule Log flume, and Little Drummer Boy “teacups” were oddly out of place in July, even when you’re 7. In the photos, I look like a (rein)deer in headlights.

4. Minneapolis on a ridiculously windy day, which, as I understand it, is pretty much every day between October and March. Not sure why they call Chicago the windy city; it’s here.

4 Strange Jobs I’ve Held

1. Life-sized Care Bear at the opening of a Rhode Island strip mall. It was a billion degrees outside, and about a billion + 50 inside the giant, pink, furry suit.

2. Working the drive-thru window at the now-defunct Jack in the Box in Wilmington, Mass., where the sound system in the clown’s head was so distorted that customers didn’t bat an eye when, my voice thick with intercom fuzz, I regularly barked, “Welcome to Smack in the Chops!”

3. Beat news reporter for the Boston Globe. I knew this wasn’t for me when I lamely asked the victim of a house fire, who’d lost her home as well as her priceless collection of antique books, “So, uh, how do you feel?”

4. Telephone operator, back when a person actually answered when you dialed 0. Another bad match—the nosy writer in me couldn’t help but listen in on the more compelling conversations, all that summer long. I quit before I was fired.

4 favorite foods

1. Dark chocolate

2. A nice glass of red

3. Good coffee

4. Really good bread

And Finally: 4 Reasons I’m Uncomfortable Writing This

1. It feels slightly narcissistic. Talking about myself in detail feels self-aggrandizing. And, what’s more:

2. I suspect that no one really cares.

3. Also, others are seeking out this information, I’m not merely volunteering it—entirely.

4. I’m cheating. These really aren’t “secrets”—and all that the word implies: something private, confidential, furtive. Do any of us who compile these lists really shine light on our darkest and worst moments…? Am I accessing my heart’s mysteries? Well… someday, maybe. But not yet. And certainly not this easily—actually, for either of us.

All of which brings me back to: So why would you publish these few revealing details for strangers to gawk at? The short answer, of course, is that none of you are exactly strangers; and, what’s more, it’s all about getting to know a bit more about each other.

 

I like Susan Scrupski’s take: “Similarly, learning about each other in a more personal way, we’re exposed to more candid layers about a person. The more our social graphs overlap, we make choices about who we want to continue to build our futures with together and who we are willing to release.”

 

Not much has changed in this basic pattern over the ages, she points out. “What is different today, however, is now we do it globally and in sometimes random encounters. That’s different.”

 

Now, who’s up for playing it forward? Richard Binhammer? Kami Huyse? Carolyn Townes? CB Whittemore?

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