hi, my name is

I just got back from a convention. You know, one of those places where all sorts of people come from the opposite sides of the country to meet in a big building wearing sticky labels that say "Hi, My Name Is _____." Except this was a convention of multiple personalities, and it was pretty common to see people wearing 2 or more of these labels, with different names on them.

Now, I can't tell you it was all that easy to know which name to call anyone at any one particular point in time. If you had met someone before, the name you used last time might not be the right name for this particular meeting.

And I don't mean to cast a bad light on people who suffer from multiple personalities or other psychological illnesses. I mean, I have the utmost respect for them. I too suffer from momentary dillusions of identity. As many of you who have read this site for a while can attest, I do tend to blur the lines between reality and well, misreality.

Not to say that any of you can really say which things I write are true and which are false. Not to say that this is a multiple choice test or that I will be collecting your scantrons soon. But how would you know?

Not to say I ever really know either. Sometimes I manage to convince even myself that I did the things I allude to here. Sometimes I just think I like to allude to things, that somehow that's more exciting then actually doing.

Whatever the reality, I went to this convention so that I could hide behind my fractured reality and start to develop my split personalities in a more social and professionally-advancing situation.

I was on the Multiple Personality Writer's Track, a series of workshops and lectures that they were offering within the scope of the entire convention. I was there with other people with dubious personalities who knew how to use a pen to confuse people.

I guess I was better off than most, as all of my personalities knew how to write. Some people went from knowledgable, educated individuals to almost primal beasts when their personalities changed. For me, the greatest shifts might be from a personality who thinks that peanut butter goes well on jam-covered bread and one that things the jam goes better on peanut butter-covered bread.

It's these dramatic shifts in personality that has the scientific community so perplexed. Millions of dollars of goverment and foundation money has been poured into the quest to understand these problems. Someday man might finally know for sure the correct order of peanut butter and jam, but I doubt it will be in my lifetime. And either way, will it really help the lives of these individuals I met at this convention? Perhaps, but probably not right away.

And by the way, in case you were wondering, my tags read: "hi, my name is witheld for matters of national security."