Telling Stories About Myself

  Telling Stories About Myself
     by Igor Ergo the Ego

It’s likely that a cow will begin mooing when it’s hungry. Rats run when cats appear. Buzzards stop flapping when they enter updrafts. Horses neigh when neighing desires arrive inside them. Writers writing memoirs dramatize the foibles of others, through humour often, or anecdote, or for the sake of reader interest whenever they feel the need to imply nice things about themselves (that is, the writers).
     I thought of this less than desirable feature, this self-interest, in me this morning at coffee with the seven seniors who meet from 10:00 to 11:30 down on our amenities floor. Someone asked me (I think it may have been Ron, a former RCMP officer) what my employment had been. I said that my career started in Chortiz, MB Canada teaching grades 6 to 8. Then in Grand Rapids, MB it was a few years of grades 2 and 3 and then in Thompson, MB I taught grades 9 through 12. After that, I lectured at the U of M to all the levels from undergrads to graduates. 
     Of course, there is nothing especially ungood about indicating that one is praiseworthy, or to be adored or to appear trustworthy. War is worse than that. Screaming and yelling at somebody is worse. Taking off one’s habiliment in the middle of church is worse. Acquiring someone else’s money and or jewels without that person knowing is worse, also. But in my books it is not recommended to inevitably appear to be these things (emphasis on inevitably).  I am, by way of example, not even trustworthy to myself in the sense that if I examine or reexamine a thought or comment of mine to see if it attempts to pretend to a goodness or a value that actually is not there or is possibly even its opposite, then I frequently find that at another level of thought (or intuition) the particular thought I am examining is really a cousin to a lie. It is a misintentioning, a pressing forward of something that supplements the other person’s view of me, that  compliments me in the other person’s eyes.
     Enough analysis. Enough inward-lookingness. I am only (and prosaically) attempting to establish some sort of completed thought about the self-inflating ego’s inevitability when I look about me at conversations, conversations that all cannot help but shine light on the human habit of speech to impress others with the speaker’s good qualities, his admirability. And as you will notice, here I have done exactly that in this little reflection by appearing to you to think that I know a lot about the inner workings of the ego, about the secret private little motivations that each of us inevitably operates by. Please pardon me, and take it to heart never to hire a professor to fix a refrigerator.
     
     

     Immediately, I felt self conscious because I sounded to myself as if the others there would be thinking that I was boasting about my achievements. It had felt nice inside my chest to quietly announce that I had taught all these various levels of students and pupils. I’m quite happy, I admit, to attempt to impress people with things such as this once or twice in my life but I never feel comfortable doing it frequently. Not that one should not boast but that it happens so much in people’s conversations that their egos wish to self-aggrandize, that these egos hold nothing back. Not hold nothing back, exactly, but these speaking egos seem to be holding back while actually suggesting through tones of voice and fluid bodily gestures that they (the speaking egos) are to be noticed as good and trustworthy and praiseworthy and to be adored.