Well um, Shit. Hello.

-I've spent a good six weeks or so drumming up the courage to create this blog and now that I have, I'm realizing I'm not sure I have much to say.

No, that's not true at all. I'm realizing that I may not know how to say very much at all. To hear me tell it, I've lived my entire life in a series of carefully edited anecdotes (did I tell you how my mom almost died while giving birth to me?? She was dead for like three minutes! True Story!)..... At least, that's what it seems my life has become in retrospect. I think, like every modern day blogger who suffers from the delusion that her or his life story simply MUST be told... I may have lost the ability to speak plainly about the past. And the present? Well that would require a certain level of self-awareness, that is if you ever want to do more than Tweet your breakfast. But in-depth self analysis, now who has time for that? I'd rather tell a good story. A story that makes me LOOK good... like a hero. Or a victim. Or a guru or a Leader or Rebel. Tell you anything that places me center stage in the Jane Laplain Show. So, I find myself slipping into story teller mode whenever sharing information about myself. I grew up a poor black child, wah wah waaaah..

Except I didn't grow up that way at all. I grew up a very quiet, very angry, very curious, and despite my best revisionist history, very average human child. My average life was perhaps complicated by a number of nonstandard deviations from the great American Novel. My race (black). My ethnicity (haitian creole, but culturally black american, but passing for Latino). My gender noncomformity (assigned male, conspicuously feminine and vocal about it). My class (Attending rich private schools, while living in poor black neighborhoods). My poor eyesight (I'm thisclose to legally blind... which is still a world apart in my opinion). My latchkey kid upbringing. I could go on and on... but in truth, I'm no more wounded or special or intelligent or honest than anyone else. So it's not my life story I need to tell you.

But there's something I have to say... and it scares the shit out of me that I might actually go and say it... especially since I have no idea what it might be.

Stay tuned. (<--- Note to self).