Your Inner Toon

I was arranging to meet a stranger at a crowded spot in Boston Common, before each of us realized we had no way of recognizing one another.

"How about a picture?," she suggested.

"I don't really have any good photos of myself," I told her. "But I do have this cartoon that looks a whole lot like me."

"Oh! Me too."

So we exchanged cartoons, and met at a crowded spot in Boston Common.

I haven't invoked the "B word" around here in a while, but ... can you say "precession of simulacra"?

* * *

Second Life keeps coming up in conversation, and it's not even me who keeps bringing it up. It's the New York Times, Business Week, the Boston Phoenix; it's people at work, people at the café. I'm not even particularly interested in Second Life.

Second Life (in case you've had your head stuck in reality) is a 3D virtual world: you create yourself an avatar and then ... do whatever you want. Second Life is a "massively multiplayer online" game, except it's not a game: there's no objective, there's no way to win. You don't team up into "tribes" in order to blast people with laser guns. Instead, most people seem to find themselves a spot of land and settle down. They set up businesses, and when they're not working, they meet up with friends or with strangers.

They do all of the things they might have been doing in their real life. Sorry—I mean, their first life.

The Sanskrit word avatāra means "descent," and usually implies a deliberate descent into lower realms of existence.

* * *

It's good, I think, for people to get in touch with their inner "toon." If you can see yourself as a cartoon character, then it's harder to take yourself too too seriously. It helps like trying to imagine yourself as a Muppet helps. And likewise, I think it's good to be able to see others as cartoon characters: it's somehow easier to empathize and sympathize with them when they're drawn in bright colors and exaggerated lines.

Maybe it's because it's easy to imagine them with an anvil dropping on their head.

Now I look at photos of myself and they don't really resemble me. I look at cartoons of myself and they seem a truer representation.

Does that mean it's now hard for me to take myself seriously, at all?

Has my second life become my first life, and my first life faded into the background, into a lower realm of existence?

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