Mirror mirror, on the wall

I am very excited about the date. It is 06-06-06.
*clap clap clap*
Yes, we are kiddish like that. What to do?

Anyways, this post is about bigger and better things. Ahem.

So Jupiter wrote about the predicament of putting a photo on blogger/orkut/gtalk/watchacallit. Should it look better than your real self, or worse? If you do the former, you will have trouble when you meet these people in real life. If you do the latter, you might find people vanishing from your blog or friendly-orkut-network. Either way, its a tough call. And worst is, if you dont have a photo at all for some time on your profiles, leading people to construct a picture of you based on what they think or read. And when you finally do put a photo, it doesnt meet the expectations you have built up. You know you've hit road #3 if you get comments like "you look so different from what I had imagined" (which means I thought you'd look better), or non-commital compliments like "nice pic" ('nice' is the most diplomatic word ever... right after 'fine'). Anyways, so all this finally led me to write the post I've been thinking of writing for a very long time.

What picture does our blog paint of us?

Of course, I'm writing more on behalf of the average anonymous blogger who still has some amount of mystery surrounding him or her, leaving people guessing about what kind of person they are. If she writes feminist posts about women and their right to wear skimpy clothes, does it mean she is a slut? If he writes humourous posts day in day out, does it mean he is the charmer with a great sense of humour in real life conversations? If she mentions shoes and clothes and shopping in every second post, does it mean that she is stinking rich, or worse, spending too much of her money inappropriately? If he writes about love and romance and poetry, is he therefore single? If she talks about getting complimented on her hairstyle, does she therefore look pretty?

I suppose you cant fault anyone for forming an impression about what you really are, based on what you blog. Sometimes maybe, we can stop their imaginations from running away with this picture, and we dont. Most times though, we cant, even if we want. What will you do? Have a poll on your blog about what people imagine you to be? So really, can we stop ourselves from 'misleading' readers? Also, do we always care about setting the record straight? I think not.

But one thing is for sure... a lot of us use blogging to give vent to that facet of our personality which very often doesnt see the light of day in real life. I mean, you cant so often sit and read out poetry to your friends. So you do it on your blog. You cant keep explaining your complicated thought process to every stranger, so you post about it. And funnily enough, it manages to attract enough like-minded people who seem to understand what you want to say. Yet, you might not be the poet. Or the thinker. Or the bitch. Or the angel. Point is, very often, there is a predominant trait of ours which goes on the blog. Extrapolating it to form the rest of the jigsaw, might sometimes be a huge mistake.


Update: Umm... It seems most people are assuming my entire post is about physical appearance. And about profile photos and such. No, I was talking about the personality that gets depicted on a blog. Cool/saintly/mean/wacko/bitchy/*insert suitable adjective*. We might be such. In parts. Or, we might not. How would you know?