About me

Obviously, the photo on this page is not of me but the lovely Gwyneth Paltrow, who has been "cast" as me. Mona and I agreed to choose each other's actress, so I picked Nicole Kidman for her and she picked Gwyneth for me. They're both close in some ways, but I don't think either is quite right.

For one thing, Nicole would need to lift weights for a few months if she wanted to play Mona. As for Gwyneth, I don't think I look like her in the majority of the photos I have seen of her. Plus, she is so elegant and sophisticated, and I am not those things. But Mona made her casting choice based on a handful of specific photos (including this one) in which I will admit there is a resemblance.

So, backstory-wise, I was born and grew up in the Great Lakes region of the U.S., "attended" college without graduating, and that's where I met Jack. I struggled in classes because I was dealing with the symptoms of undiagnosed bipolar disorder. I experience mania much more often than depression (and I'll take that balance any day), but even mania can be a considerable impediment to doing well in school. But I don't mean to make excuses. While I was struggling in classes, though, I was feeling good about the paintings I was doing at that time.

I dropped out before my third year, and not long after that I totaled my car in the middle of the night on a desolate country road. It was a convertible and I was not wearing a seat belt so I probably should have been killed, yet in that moment Grace was kind to me. I was thrown unharmed into a corn field where I promptly got lost among the rows and ran in the wrong direction like an unnamed character in the opening scene of a slasher movie.

That was my low point, and I ended up in a psych ward before finally getting on the right medication. And soon after that, I met Mona who quickly became my anchor and rock and other stable metaphors.

So nowadays, heck, I am reasonably sane most of the time. So much so that Mona and I are putting into action our long-discussed plan to get me pregnant. In our research, we learned you need a dude for that so we recruited my former boyfriend, Jack.

Let's see . . . what else should I say? Well, there's spiritual stuff and my weird dreams. And of course, there's the naked thing. I have had a lifelong compulsion to be in my birthday suit as much as possible. This is mostly just at home and among my girlfriends.

One thing I am really good at is making friends -- and keeping them even when they move away to all parts of the globe. I spend a lot of time talking on the phone, writing emails (and even writing actual paper letters that I put in the mail!) A couple people suggested I start "blogging" and so I did. At first I imagined that my blog would only be read by people I know in Real Life to whom I had sent the actual specific address. So I was a little surprised when I started hearing from people I don't know but who came across my site somehow. Being smarter than me about these things, Mona knew that would happen and that's why she insisted on the "fantasy cast" thing.

Most of my Real Life friends are female, but online I hear from lots of dudes. As everyone knows, most straight guys are really into lesbians (or at least the idea of lesbians) yet they each seem to think they are the only one. As long as they are respectful and not crude, I find it amusing to answer their probing questions.

You can read more about the above-mentioned topics or take the scenic route through my journal entries.

A note from Future Libby: I wrote this journal a number of years ago, but then the blog-hosting site I had been using closed down, and my blog was gone. I had saved a copy on my computer, but it wasn't available online anymore. To me, that seemed appropriate since I wasn't maintaining it anymore, but people kept asking me about it. Then Molly offered to put it on her site, so we rebuilt it here and sent everyone the new link. I didn't make any substantive changes to the text (other than some corrections here and there), but in the intervening years, lots more photos had been added to the internet of the famous people we had chosen to be our avatars. Friends started sending me new images they had found (or photoshipped) and I added a lot of those to my pages. That's how Gwyneth Paltrow ended up cast as both me and, my mother. That was perfect because my mother and I do look a lot alike.