tell me your name, tell me your story, 'cause i'm into it

I took a poetry workshop my senior year of college and at the end of the semester we all wrote down on little scraps of paper descriptions of each other’s “voices” as writers.

These were the descriptions I got:

Serious and introspective
Honest and strong
Austere, furtive, shy, quiet
Self-aware, resigned to a lot but still going strong
Sad often, somewhat lonely, interesting, real – almost harshly sometimes, sweetly sometimes. Impressively self-aware, sometimes.

And my favorite:

This voice is at the same time introspective and exhibitionist; unapologetic, sincere, and yet slightly inhibited.

That’s me, an inhibited exhibitionist. Really, aren’t most bloggers? What we write can be intensely personal and revealing, but always selectively so. It’s the new Show and Tell.

So welcome to my peepshow. Considering this new blog as a fresh start, I go back and forth about whether to be more or less personal than I used to be.

But I always appreciate a little About Me page on other blogs, knowing that it’s only the Cliffs Notes and that to get any sense of who the person is, I simply have to read their blog.

So a bit more about me. (This was supposed to be after the jump, but I am apparently retarded and haven't mastered that yet, it's late, I'm exhausted and gotta get to bed. Will try to fix when I get back.)

I’m a transplanted Texan who can barely tolerate these harsh Midwestern winters I now live with.

I’m a born and bred Southern girl, but no, I don’t have a Southern accent, thank you very much.

I’m a second-generation Korean American who really doesn’t like kimchi at all, to my mother’s undying dismay. I also suck at math.

I'm a fifth year doctoral candidate who’s mightily struggling to get my Ph.d in psychology. Fantasize about quitting all the time, but I know I won’t. I’m going to finish or die trying.

I'm a food lover, bookworm, audiophile, and hopeless romantic.

I'm shy and introverted in real life, so naturally I bare all, at great length, online.

I do relationship research and in my biggest career fantasies, I’m a freelance writer with a column and a book who serves as a liason between the world of research and everyone else. Like Sex and the City, but empirically driven!

Until my current and best boy, I had a bad habit of dating blondes I went to high school with. I’ve never casually dated, i.e., I’ve never been on a date that didn’t lead to a relationship. A late bloomer, I didn’t date until college. My junior year of college I started dating someone I thought I'd end up with. We dated for five years before breaking up. The end of that relationship prompted me to start my original blog, where I really didn’t hold back much of anything at all. Uncensored angst, boy-craziness, and navel-gazing galore.

Then, only a few months after the breakup, despite swearing to never venture into online dating, I sort of accidentally and half jokingly did so, met someone and fell deeply in love despite my best efforts not to and despite not being sure I was ready to date again.

We’ve been together ever since. I had so much baggage following me from the last relationship that it’s been an ongoing challenge for me to open up, stop holding back, and stop whining about how badly I’ve been burned and how scary love is, blah blah angstcakes.

I’ll always be more than a little neurotic, but the boy makes navigating the ups and downs of love easier than it’s ever been before.

Felicity is not my real name. But as mentioned before, if asked to think of which two fictional characters I resemble, Ally McBeal and Felicity are the first two to come to mind. On any given day, I either embrace this or hate it.

More (or perhaps less, when I have time to edit) when I get back from California

pleased to meet you
hope you'll guess my name
but what's puzzling you
is the nature of my game
-rolling stones