An officer and a gentleman walk into a bar and meet Robert Zimmerman and Billy the Kid

I criticize my sister about posting her life online. Does anybody really care about all the little details of her life? She takes pictures of her dinner and posts them to Facebook. She checks in on Foursquare at just about every place she goes to. She shares her opinion about every freaking single thing that goes on in the world. She used to keep a Live Journal. I think she has a blog. She tweets. I seriously do not get why she has to share all of her thoughts on the internet, especially when it comes to personal stuff.

Or at least I didn't until about 10 minutes ago. Before that, I believed that really personal shit belonged in a private journal for the writer's eyes only. Who cares about your problems? Aren't you just starving for attention when you make that shit public? Keep it to yourself!

But for some reason, I have created a blog for everyone to read. Now people have access to my thoughts. Or at least the thoughts I want to share.

Should anybody care? No

Am I a hypocrite? Yes.

I have acted on impulse. Will I decide to trash this thing tomorrow? Maybe.

And really, that's the essence of this blog. And why Richard Gere is acting as the background to this page. For now.

For anyone that's seen the movie I'm Not There, you'll recognize Richard Gere as the character Billy the Kid. Here's a brief synopsis of the movie for those of you that are not familiar with it: six different actors play six different personas that Bob Dylan has displayed throughout his career. Bob Dylan has always changed everything about him, whether it was his music, his style of clothing, his personality, his singing voice, etc., etc. The point is that Bob Dylan couldn't be just one person all the time. He constantly had to change for whatever reason. According to Wikipedia (and if you're against Wikipedia, just keep in mind that I'm citing it for information about a movie, not for something important to all of humanity like Keynesian Economics, you tight asses), the Billy the Kid character is supposed to portray the persona of Bob Dylan as an "outsider."

At the end of the movie (spoiler alert!) Billy the Kid recites a monologue that pretty much sums up his life, but really sums up the life of Bob Dylan, too. At one point he says:

People are always talking about freedom, the freedom to live a certain way without being kicked around. 'Course the more you live a certain way the less it feels like freedom. Me? I can change during the course of a day. When I wake I'm one person, when I go to sleep I know for certain I'm somebody else. I don't know who I am most of the time. It's like you got yesterday, today and tomorrow all in the same room. There's no telling what can happen.

The quote pretty much sums me up, too. Everyday I feel like a different person with different thoughts and different goals and different likes and different dislikes. I never know what part of me is going to carry on to the next day. Unlike Billy the Kid, though, I don't think the changes I go through on a daily basis are based on some fear of not having freedom. Part of me wishes I could be pidgeonholed and just be one person. Part of me wishes that I lived one certain way.

Anyway, if this blog is a representation of myself and my thoughts, then it makes the most sense for its title to derive from a quote by someone who never felt like the same person day after day.

For instance, I was going to write about my future aspirations to get involved in my community either through town government or some type of civic organization or community activist group.

And then I started writing about Billy the Kid/Richard Gere/Bob Dylan.

And by tomorrow I may just say, "Fuck my community."

So there.