Introductions

[debka_notion]

Recently someone emailed the Lishma email-group with an introduction, and invited other folks to follow suite. Being the correspondence-nut that I am (and being that I'm being receptionist today at work, and am out of jobs to do besides waiting for the phone to ring and smiling at the people setting up for the Bris tonight, I decided to write my own introduction as well. It's a weird thing to do- how do you sum up who you are in a paragraph, especially an informal one? I mean, I took the usual approach of giving my university, major, minor, some hobbies and intellectual interests. But what does that really say about me? I mean- I've had correspondences with people I hadn't met/had met only briefly- and people are just entirely different in writing. But even in person- what does an introduction really say about you? It's like trying to describe a color to a blind person, almost- to use an entirely overused metaphor. It just seems so useless- and yet everyone has this impulse to do it, and it's reassuring to feel like you'll know the people you'll be meeting a little bit, even though the images one can build up via correspondence can be more confusing than helpful much of the time.