Perhaps not unusually, I approach cliche, pithy reversed sayings with mingled delight and disgust. Oh, how felicitously memorable, how strikingly apt, those aphorisms, like "people don't care how much you know until they know how much you care," and "God doesn't call the qualified, he qualifies the called." One can't be on Facebook long before stumbling across one. But they're just so irritatingly pat, so simplistically tidy. And then there's identity. I was about to speculate maybe it's just evangelicals -- and Mennonites (yes, those are overlapping categories, but they also have distinctions) -- who are so obsessed with hammering it out, but then I recalled the number of times a character fervently declares "I'm a surgeon!" or "I'm a cop!" on Grey's Anatomy and Rookie Blue (yes, my tastes in TV lean strongly toward the soapy), so it seems a desperate need to define our identity and a pathological insecurity ...
a smattering of brain droppings from a self-styled writer