Given my extravagant lifestyle, which includes craft beers and state of the art electronics, I suspect that making ends meet when I’m yoked to a fixed income might be problematic, so I’m entertaining ideas about how I might generate supplemental dinero after I stumble out of the ever more complicated labyrinth of teaching high school.

My latest obsession, fueled by my reading of Grant McCracken’s 2009 book Transformations: Identity Construction in Contemporary Culture, is what Jung called the persona, the public mask we present to the world.  After I googled “personae,”  I ran across this WEBSITE promoting a gallery exhibition called “Projecting Personae.”  As I read the website’s description of the ideas underlying the exhibition, it occurred to me that I could render those ideas a tad bit less pretentiously, perhaps increasing the attendance and garnering more publicity.  I’ll let you be the judge.

The original description:

One’s cultural perspective can be seen as the practice of interfacing one’s psyche with an oppositional world of irreconcilable differences. As we seek to combat historic oppressions and correct cultural assumptions, our identities take on a state of perpetual negotiation—between (sic)* one’s flesh, one’s façade and one’s functions—a convergence of activities, beliefs, costumes and customs, broadcast via the surfaces of our bodies, upon which our socio-cultural transcriptions and evolutions can be read.

My edit:

How you see shit is conditioned by the shit you see all around you — the hobo chugging a 24-oz. Bull, the Upper East Side swell in a camel hair coat. History ain’t been kind to neither black folk nor crackers nor gay queer-theorists nor womenfolk for that matter, so if you’re one of the above, you gotta pretend every now that you ain’t you, slap on a mask, figure out who you wanna look like in various certain situations. This shit depends on your DNA, what you pretending to be, and what you’re doing at the time,   It’s a mash up of what’s going down, what you believe, what you wanna wear according to the situation — whether it be an appearance before a magistrate or a invitation to a pagan Solstice party. I repeat, this display depends on your DNA, the tattoos you’ve acquired, and the life you’ve lived.

Come to think of it, I bet there ain’t much money in it.

* among, not between, goddammit!

One of the pieces from the exhibition