stolen identities

 so…I was thinking about this yesterday: we are all walking around with stolen identities. 

Many of the things that make me who I am are really just my favorite things about other people – at some point I thought: "that’s cool" and started doing things their way. maybe everyone doesn’t do this. maybe it’s just me. 

I first noticed it when I was a teenager – that my laugh changed. and kept changing. While I was best friends with Erin Greene I pretty much had Erin’s laugh, but when our friendship fell out it all kind of morphed, I probably went through 3 or 4 different stages before I landed on something pretty similar to my mom’s laugh. And even today, I still sound like my mom, but with an evil queen kind of edge to it – like I’ve watched too many movies or something.

Whenever I was in the beginning stages of a relationship or friendship during college I would quickly take on things that I picked up from that person. My husband, John, gave me the worst case of this. I would say these random things, like: "Thank you Jesus" (neither of us could really be classified as church goers, much less the type of people that would say that in seriousness), "Heard" (kitchen lingo that slid into my real life vocabulary because I was in love with him), and I started cursing like a sailor (or more precisely, like a 29 year old guy working in a restaurant). People looked at me like I was crazy, but I couldn’t stop the stuff from falling out of my mouth because it was so cool to me when he said it.

I’m also a foodie because of John, and a semi-serious wine drinker. I didn’t drink wine before I worked at the Range, and I would have never given two shits what part of the cow my steak was coming from, but I decided to care because he cared, and that’s something that’s never going to leave me.

I play video games because my earliest serious boyfriend, Josh, played video games and convinced me to buy a playstation 2 instead of a dvd player when I got my first apartment. Thanks for the final fantasy obsession, Josh. I blog because some of the cool kids I worked with at Chinese Kitchen in high school had blogs on open diary. So I gave it a shot and wrote about all of my personal troubles on the internet too. I bought a radio converter for my car so that I could listen to my iphone library and pandora while driving – would have never done that except that Matthew was always listening to music through his phone in the car.

We take a piece of other people with us – sometimes consciously, and even more times not-so-consciously. There are people that I may never see or talk to again, but I will share some of their interests/habits for the rest of my life. I am not self-made. I am a kaleidoscope of the influences of other people. 

Just another testament to hanging out with the right crowd. No wonder our parents are so freaked out about that.