I can't summarize my past.

You've done it, I'm sure. Summarized your life. Sometimes it comes out one way, sometimes another. You wrote a bio for a playbill, maybe, when you starred as one of the old biddies of Arsenic and Old Lace. Or maybe it's just what you do when meeting clients at cocktail parties in cold distant cities, in between staring through your martini glass at the sushi, imagining you are really on a cold distant star in a depressing science fiction book, but just in the first chapter, which means you'll be a hero soon, rocketing away into a new and polished galaxy.

I won't go into all the reasons why it's impossible to feel satisfied with 250 words or less to auto your biography. I'm sure they're obvious. And if they're not, then you are not the reader for me, so go away.

I mean, sure, it's possible to work up a few telling details. And as the woman last night admitted, there's types of people, they fit into categories, it's easy to hear a few lines and know immediately what you're dealing with.

Like later, when she pointed out that our server was that skiing type, with pink cheeks and a laid-back attitude, the kind that populate liberal arts colleges in Vermont and Colorado. I know who he is, she said, I totally know who he is.

But me, she didn't know me. You don't fit any of the molds I know, she said, discarding her cup of ice. You're a new one. Can I ask you questions?

She used to work in HR, which I think explains a lot.

Any detail can explain a person, I guess, if you look through it correctly, use it knowing it's not a magnifying glass but a kaledeiscope. There's shiny pieces of your own instrument interfering with your vision of the subject.

When I try to summarize my background, people say things like, "Wow, that must have been different."

To which I say, as eloquent as always, "Yep."

The problem with having a "different" childhood is that, while people may be interested, they also immediately feel threatened. Everyone either likes to feel his or her family dysfunction was the worst existing, or, more simply, they don't like to be upstaged.

So I don't like to draw attention to my abnormal story. It's frankly too much. It's the kind of thing that gets therapist types salivating - seriously, I'm the dream client they always wished they had: cult beginnings of a religious and theatrical nature, runaway father, abused mother, sexuality issues, California... I've watched career counselors completely throw my career issues out the window when they get a whiff of my history. They can't help it. It's like waving red meat in front of a canine.

Normalcy is, of course, a mythical notion, impossible to judge. I have met very few people without interesting stories to tell. I've never met anyone I would label 'normal.' Boring, yes, but normal, not so much.

I won't summarize my past here. It will have to come out on its own. I'm thinking it's a better way to approach something so strange and large. Treat it like it is normal.