Who I Am: My Identity Crisis

Who I Am: My Identity Crisis

Bonjour. Who, perhaps you ask, am I? A tres excellent question, plumbing the depths of the well in which I float, always wondering who I am and why my diaper is wet.

Perhaps my name holds a clue: I am called OperaKait de Brennan et de Poto (which is NOT pronounced "pothole"). I am, allegedly, the cyber-child of two cyber-people - there, now you can see the Freudian roots of my predicament: do I exist, or do I think I exist, and therefore I am? But perhaps I am putting Descartes before the horse.

My mother (La Brennan): mother-daughter relationships are fraught with fright, and my mother is really quite frightening. She thinks, but therefore is not necessarily on the right track, she is a poet, and spends hours at the terminal (Halifax’s Stanfield International) finding things to write about, like lost luggage, airline food (which she calls an oxymoron) and screaming children. But her biggest hit to date was her immortal "Ode to a Loo in a Public Place", which I cannot bear to recite at this moment.

She is in love with her cat, who is named after an Irish singer whose name is a secret. The two of them spend so much time together that I have developed an Electra Complex: I want to strangle my mother and marry the cat. Only I'm too young to do that right now.

My age? Now, that's another problem. I feel like I'm a mature adult (unlike my mother) but seem to be only two years old (which, in cat years, is 14, making me a feline teenager). So I ask myself: what is "age"? Einstein's Theory of Relatives may be relevant: I am aging faster than you are, dear reader, because YOU are presently on a space ship heading to Aldebaran. And you forget to pack your toothbrush. Paint the sky with cavities, or what Hawking calls "black holes."

I age, therefore I can have a blog.

My father (Le Poto): father-daughter relationships are complex, especially when your father is a ghost. Now, there's a ghost of a chance you will believe this, but it is true: he haunts the Palais Garnished in gay and straight Paris, clinging Oedipal-like to matronly-looking chandeliers, the ultimate French phallic symbol besides the baguette. They light up his life, I guess, as well as his cholesterol (here I refer to the baguette, of course, and not the "bag" - who is my mother. But does this make ME a baguette then? So many questions, so little online time - I have dial-up, you see, because both of my parents are [1] cheap and [2] unable to accept change, even when total strangers offer them money.) But I digress, back to Papa:

He is an actor, or so I think - you see, he always masks his true identity, and thus I have inherited his fragile identity gene. When he figures out who HE is maybe I can figure out who I am, but maybe not. "C'est la vie", as my favourite poet, Riene des Huns, always says.

The courtship: my parents were thrown together in cyberspace when God rolled the dice Einstein didn't want Him to play with. Albert apparently never learned to share and wanted to keep the dice all to himself. This is the result of poor upbringing, and thus offers further proof (80%) of Freud's Theory of Relatives.

Mommy and Papa had a brief cyber-fling, which is part of traditional Highland dancing. But, both being chaste by bill collectors, they never actually MET: she remained in the Great White North and he remained Estoned. Well, most of the time. It was odd: she was a teetotaller, while he totally abhorred tea, unless it was imbued with performance-enhancing scotch steroids (for Highland flinging, of course).

At some point in cyberspace, when a "1" and a "0" were passing each other, a genetic reaction took place and I was conceived. Since it was cyberspace, I was born able to use a keyboard and mouse, which I stole from Mommy's cat. I learned to post before I learned to walk, and discovered that I made as much sense as anyone else posting in cyberspace. This was, for me, "a good thing."

Now you know, dear readers, sort of who I am - well, I did say it was complex, and if you need to read this again, be my ghost, er, guest, while I go back into my Opera Box.

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