Not So Anonymous

After you spend a day or two in Budapest, you quickly come to realize that this is a city that loves its statuary. Moreover, if you were an old guy alive during the infancy of this country and you don’t have a statue of you erected somewhere in town, you were probably the only loser on your block who didn’t. “Statues of old dudes” as Hubby put it, were on buildings, in parks, on monuments, and just about anywhere else the people of Hungary could fit one.

But my favourite of this plethora of statues, the one I most looked forward to visiting, sitting in the lap of, and fashioning my own future after, is known only as Anonymous. No one ever knew who exactly this chronicler of King Bela’s life was yet he made enough of an impact on his audience that they carved his unknown likeness in stone and set it out for future generations to revere.

Anonymous. I can barely spell the word correctly without my spell check and yet that is exactly who I am in the blogosphere. I am a giraffe who lives in Egypt with her husband who works for shady employers known only as the Instution. I’m a woman who shares parts of her life with other equally anonymous people all over the world. Some of you are less shrouded in secrecy than others, but to each other we are all faces on a screen and voices we hear in our heads.

I long to be like the man in the statue whose greatness has been deemed worthy by an entire country. Yet I hesitate because I know that I don’t want to walk into this greatness in shadowed anonymity. Am I the world traveling, blogging giraffe? Or am I a woman with a voice yearning to be heard above the din.

Anonymous had reasons for wearing his mask and so do many bloggers. We say we don’t want people to “know who we are” yet we continue to share ourselves – our featureless selves – with other strangers. Is the dream of being anonymous on the blogosphere a lie? Do you all know who I am because you have read my words and read between the lines of my repartee? Or am I simply one of a billion blogging drones sitting in a darkened room waiting fearfully and expectantly to be unmasked?

Who will erect a statue to the nameless blogger?