Day 159 - Profiles Story

Profiles Story

Matthew Ryan Fischer

She had forty-seven separate online profiles – different emails, different profiles on job sites and social networking sites, the whole works. If you stumbled across one and didn’t know any better, you might think they were individual people – men, women, children, elderly, she had them all. It started as a bit of a lark, just a passing fancy to create a secondary profile. She wasn’t sure why she had done it in the first place. She made a second person up and went around making comments on her friends’ blogs and timelines. It was just a way to crack a joke or two. But she found out that she really enjoyed doing it. So one extra profile became two and that became three and then more and more. Some friends knew about some of the profiles while other friends knew about other profiles, but no single friend knew about all the profiles. She supposed that if all her friends compared notes they could probably figure forty-four or forty-five of them out, but really who had that type of spare time on their hands to go running around comparing notes. She seriously doubted that anyone had the time or that anyone actually called it ‘comparing notes’ when they compared notes. Some people called it ‘talking behind someone’s back’ or ‘talking shit’ or whatever other phrase they could think of, but she was fairly certain she had never heard any of her friends utter the phrase ‘comparing notes.’

Irene was a powerful woman. She made smart men act stupid. She was flirtatious and confident and always in control. Irene was based on the many incarnations of Irene Adler. Irene Adler in all her manifestations was most impressive. Men were little boys and a strong woman made them into the littlest of boys. She didn’t think too deeply into why that was. She figured maybe deep down all men wanted to be reduced back to childhood and let their mother take care of them. But that seemed a bit too Freudian and the analysis stopped there. Still, Irene was a fun profile to maintain.

Sylvia was a bit of a downer. But so was Sylvia Plath. Sylvia was deep and brooding and liked to remind people that deep and brooding people must be especially intelligent. They must be, or why else would they be so sad? Very few people agreed with this premise or responded to Sylvia’s friend requests. The world, it seemed, enjoyed happy and bright people over depressing pessimism.

Not all of her profiles were modeled after famous people and literary characters. But many of them were. That was because she read too much, but unfortunately wasn’t creative enough to invent enough of her own characters. She had little desire to be creative in that way. She just liked speaking in all the many voices. It was like acting without having to be on stage or face the public scrutiny. She just invented ideas and conversations and could walk away. It was like writing without having to understand story structure.

A political blog was created so that twelve different profiles with twelve different political philosophies could argue. They were good arguments and she certainly could capture multiple sides to any argument. The arguments were so heated and the exchanges sometimes so insulting, she had to moderate herself and ban certain profiles from posting further posts. She realized the absurdity of getting into heated debates with herself and having to ban herself from her own sites, but she also felt she had to be true to the profiles and the profile practice as a whole. She wanted to do them justice and live up to whom each individual truly was. This was one of her most popular blogs. One summer before a presidential election she recorded three hundred unique hits a day. She knew that was nothing compared to major sites, but she was fairly pleased with herself, having started with just twelve fake people.

She had tried trolling but quickly found she didn’t have the stomach for it. The web wasn’t in need of that sort of additional negativity. This profile was quickly deleted.

The profiles were her friends, they were her wishes and her dreams and desires and her lovers. They kept her company on lonely nights and told her jokes when she was feeling blue. She knew they weren’t real people. She knew they couldn’t replace her real friends. But sometimes they were better. They were so pure and unique and true, and they were all a part of her – a thought or a feeling or an emotion. She had always been looking for role models and heroes and female icons to emulate. There just weren’t enough real people to look up to sometimes, so she had to invent her own. She hoped that somehow this was helping her and possibly helping other people. Fake or not, real or unreal, if someone somewhere got a little benefit from one of her profiles then she was happy. Inspiration and hope were good things. On that, she was pretty sure all her profiles would agree. That did, however, make her wonder if it might be about time to create another profile.