Over my life, I have encountered some questions which never fail to aggravate me when people ask me them, because they have no decent answers and are never productive at all.

Here’s some of them.

What makes you think you’re so smart?

Standardized testing? High marks in school? A string of unprompted testimonials throughout my life? Puckish glee at annoying people like you?

There’s really no good answer here. (Thought that last one is probably worse than the others. ) No matter what you say, the person simply will not be happy. They have reached the point of asking you this because you have committed a mortal sin in their ears, namely acting like you think you’re smart or that you know something, and any honest, truthful answer will simply enrage them further.

So why do they ask it? I am only guessing here, but I think in their world, this question usually prompts the person to disclaim any impression they might have inadvertently given that they thought they were smart in any sense, and thus serves as a classic macho dominance move.

In their world. But in my world, between honesty and ego, I am never going to disclaim my intelligence. I do think I am “so smart” and I am perfectly willing to back up whatever I say with arguments or evidence or whatnot. I don’t think I am the smartest person in the world, but I am quite confident that I am a smart type person, and so all you are going to get in answer to this attempt to put me in my place is an answer composed of honesty and smartassery. Only the proportions will vary.

If you disagree with something I’ve said, or think I am attempting to dominate your group, feel free to disagree with me. I could be completely wrong. I am at times quite clever and even somewhat wise, but equally as often, I am completely out to sea. And if I am wrong, I’ll admit it, no problem.

But don’t ask me stupid questions like this one and expect me to back down. Homey don’t play that.

What do you think you’re doing?

Boy, do I hate this one. I’m a lifelong total klutz with three older siblings, the closest one being 4.5 years older than me, so I got to here this one way too often as a wee kid, usually when I was faithfully and carefully trying to do some task or chore and making a complete hash of it.

And like the other questions on this list, there is no good answer. Merely meekly stating what it is, literally, that you think you are doing (Washing the dishes?) does not satisfy.

And obviously, being a smartass does not help the situation.

“Well, I think I’m doing a very slow version of the “Boston Bop”, but I can’t seem to time the dip properly.”
“I think I’m being yelled at by someone bigger than me who is too impatient to explain to me how to do things so I am forced to wing it. That sound about right?”
“A poignant question. Does anyone truly know what they are doing? You know, I think it was Descartes who said ‘To be is to do…. ‘ ”

Not going to help you out, but when you’re at the bottom of the pecking order, you’ve got to fight back however you can, and sometimes, being a smartass and making your oppressors angry is the only kind of revenge you ever get.

“What, you don’t like what I said? It hurt you, and made you angry? GOOD!”

And then you just take whatever consequences may come, knowing you earned them.

Who do you think you are?

I don’t think anyone likes this one. It combined universal aggressiveness of intent with completely baffling vagueness and is nonsensical on the face of it to boot.

Again, my instinct is to give an answer which combines honesty and being a smartass.

“I don’t know, who do YOU think I am?”
“Are you asking me for ID?”
“I think I’m the Queen of the Pleasure Planet, but my underwear says my name is Tuesday…. ”
“Could you rephrase that in the form of a question with an answer?”

… or really, what I consider to be the definitive answer….

“I think I’m me. ”

I mean, what else can you think?

But obviously, none of these answers will actually help the situation. Nothing will. It’s just so incoherent and aggressive a question that just asking it is a conversation killer.

Now, being a lifelong smartass, I figure that whenever there is no good answer, you have every right to give whatever answer you will enjoy the most. I mean, you’re screwed anyhow, might as well have fun.

But I would much rather I had never been asked the question in the first place.

Who put you in charge?

OK, this one I bring on myself, though usually only by accident. I almost never actively seek a leadership position. It’s just too much of a commitment, too much of a complication, too much…. just too much, you know? But I end up in leadership positions sometimes because I have a big mouth, I’m opinionated, I express myself well, and I have natural knack for sounding like I know exactly what I am talking about.

So many is the time in my life when I have, without meaning to, ended up with everyone listening to me and following my advice and more or less electing me leader by primate consensus when I, clueless wonder, think all I am doing is stating my opinion just like everyone else.

And for someone who thinks a lot more about leadership and dominance than I do, it must seem like I am making an obvious play for power (possibly unwittingly taking it from them) and then compounding my crime by pretending innocence.

Through the years, I have learned how to do a little fancy footwork to try to avoid the situation whenever possible. But it’s always a possibility.

You can always verbal-judo the question and say “Nobody. Why, what makes you think I am in charge?”, but that will likely only make the asked confused and hence angrier.

Well, there ya have it, a random assortment of non-productive questions that I strongly dislike being asked. They have no good answers and serve only to make things worse.

I imagine I will continue to fence with questions like these my whole life. I suppose everyone does. It’s not like I am some kind of special case.

I mean, who do I think I am, anyhow?

Well, here it is, the first day of 2011,  and I have registered a new domain and blog (both named after me, because creativity is so 2010) and now I am writing its inaugural entry.

Hearts are aflutter through the blogosphere, I am sure.

For those of you who do not know, my last crazy endeavor was a project in which I attempted to write one million words in a year, called (wait for it) The Million Word Year Project. Sadly, I totally failed to write a million words in a year.

I did it in eleven months instead. Oh yeah. Hear the strut.

In order to gain a little historical context for this slightly new thing, I decided to go all the way back to my very first entry, written one year ago today.

Despite the many little errors, it still stands up quite well, I think. Reading stuff I have written is often a dicey thing with me, being the high strung and sensitive artist type. I can never entirely be sure whether I will be filled with the warm glow of accomplishment for having written something so charming and interesting and fun, or whether instead I will be visited by the deep dark demon of self-loathing and artistic dissatisfaction and be thrown in a pit of despair and depression by the mere fact that I ever penned something so completely and utterly insipid, moronic, and talentless, let alone let the world see it.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again : being sensitive is not for wimps.

But I like my first entry from way back when, a year ago today. It’s a good sample of my style. Roughly hewn in terms of structure and coherence, and a little too personal to be interesting to a wide market, but it has my wit and warmth and wordplay, so what the heck, it’s not bad for a start.

It’s a little sad to see how rip-roaring full of enthusiasm I was to change everything about my life back then, compared to how very little has actually changed as of right now. I completed the task, writing a million words (in only 11 months, strut), and that’s certainly something to be proud of, but I didn’t do much else in that time.

I didn’t learn to promote myself, for example. That whole crippling shyness thing continues to plague me. I know what excuses I used last year to keep putting it off, so that’s something, but still, I am disappointed that I did all that work and only a relatively small number of people know because I still have not developed the gumption to just go out there and spread my work around.

My plan, such as it is, for this year is to a) automate the process as much as possible via WordPress plugins, so that anything I post to here automatically gets crossposted to as many services as will let me autopost to them, and b) for the rest, developing a sort of “route”, a series of websites I visit and post my daily output to on a regular basis without stopping to think about it. That should take at least some of the tension and anxiety out of the process, and if I post regularly to the same spots every day (instead of posting once, getting no reply, and never posting there again) I might even develop a following, or at the very least, a list of persistent enemies who make it their business to flame everything I do.

Honestly, even negative attention looks good to me around now.

In the future of this site, I plan to nudge myself gently in the direction of writing more article-style entries and fewer “randomly blogging my thoughts” style entries. Things with a thesis presented in some sort of logically coherent package, with a beginning, middle, and end. But still with my signature style of warm witty bitter sarcasm. Or whatever.

Probably should cut back on the use of “or whatever” too. Whatever.

Plus, I plan to add some fancy stuff like forums and picture galleries and such in the future. I’m going to try to avoid the trap of thinking this website has to follow some strict and formal, restrictive definition of what it is supposed to be.

It’s my personal website, with my name on it and everything. So it’s whatever I want it to be at any moment, a place for me to experiment and play around and find out what works.

I figure, the important thing is to keep the site fun and full of good content and reasonably easy to navigate. As long as I stick to that, I should be OK.

One thing I definitely need to avoid is overloading myself with ambition (pressure) and so many ideas all at once that I collapse from option paralysis. There’s no blinding hurry, no need to do everything all at once and make it all perfect right from the get-go. That’s a recipe for instant failure.

So today, I write a chatty little opening entry in my usual blog style just to prime the pump, and if I feel like it later, I will poke around with the look of the site, some features, or whatever. Who knows what fun stuff I’ll add to this place eventually? There’s a lot of groovy fun stuff out there, both for WordPress and for any PHP enabled web host, and there’s nothing stopping me from giving some of it a try.

All that is required is that it works and it’s fun. That, I think, I can handle.

I just have to repeat to myself, “it doesn’t have to be perfect, it just has to be fun”, like a mantra, until it is burned into my brain and I stop trying to take things so seriously and just do whatever strikes me as fun at the time, with just enough control to keep it from veering off into pointless self-indulgence.

Sounds doable to me.