We spend our lives looking back, telling and retelling past stories. In meeting someone new, we get to know them through stories of what we've done. We look back and pull out the news clippings and headlines we hope they'll relate to.

"Ya, I played football in high school but hockey's what I always loved."

They choose something to latch onto, a point they can connect to, in this oral game of dominoes.

"Damn straight, I love hockey. I started playing again two years ago with my work hockey team."

"Oh ya, where do you work?"

We're constantly choosing which dominoes to pull from our dusty bag and which to leave behind. We build a portrait of who we think we are. We build a picture of what we think they see us as.

"Steve thinks you're gay."

"What? Where the hell did he get that from?"

"Don't know, something you said."

"What? I was telling him about when I played hockey......Oh, the dressing room story, shit, that's not what I meant."

The pictures we paint are never the one's people see. Each person interprets them their own way, putting on their own unique pair of glasses to filter them through. Their own lives, workdays, families, hangups and agendas lay over top of the pretty presentation we tirelessly create.

With every conversation, every exchange, every sentence, every word, we add another brush stroke. We see our picture but they skew it with their shoddy interpretations. We spend our entire lives doing our own public relations, constantly manufacturing, massaging and presenting the person named me.