layer cake; recent compulsive consumption of obsession d’jour, The United States of Tara, has sparked curiosity in the concept of multiple personalities hiding behind a public façade (the fact that John Corbett, of Aidan fame, happens to co-star as the most accepting, loving, Southern drawling husband ever is pure coincidence. Of course it is). The identity we choose to carve out for ourselves is but a fraction, the comparable 90% submerged iceberg metaphor wholly applicable, of what actually exists beneath the surface. How many characters do we really embody in a day? Upon examining such a notion within the confines of my own daily routine, the numbers quickly began to amount. There is a certain facet that craves routine and stability, the persona that enjoys nothing more than cooking a chili rubbed pork tenderloin dinner for her man avec a bottle of Pinot Grigio (as was the case Tuesday) and somewhere down the line sees a white picket fence, aprons from Anthropology, and tennis lessons twice a week (followed by cocktails). There is the unbridled anima, the wild thing reveling in youth and the seemingly unending opportunities to drink from bottles and coagulate in rapid conversation until the wee hours of the morn. And the darky, the suppressed id that we know to still exist deep within the recesses of our soul; a spoiled, selfish thing that throws unjustified tantrums at whim and is constantly streaked green with envy. These are just to name a select few characters we embody day in day out. And they all reside within a strange symbiotic universe, somehow coming to collaborate in defining the identity that we present to the public.

It is perhaps even more intriguing to consider how these parts will shift and shapes themselves as we grow into the people that we have not yet become, as our interests change and we traverse the globe, seeing sights that will shake us to our very core, falling in and out of love with people and places. It invites the question of the kind of people we will challenge ourselves to be, and what brands of savoir-faire we should be engaging in to make it so. Because someday we won’t all be pretty young things, and we will be resolved to coexisting with the ids and egos and superegos inside of us, and you better fucking hope that your inner child isn’t still dominating your adult self.

All we can hope for is equilibrium.