I Made CK Do It, So Shouldn't I? or, Eating My Own Dogfood

So when a friend asked for a post topic, I piped up with "If you were a character on 'Lost', which character do you think you would be?" It popped to mind because I'd just spent my daughter's nap that day reading theories on how 'Lost' "works", how it will end, and what it all means, so I had the show on my brain.

It's sort of an obnoxious question, really. "Please pigeonhole yourself based on characters on a television show who are in an extremely extraordinary situation." But I asked it, so I'll answer it too.

I cribbed this list of "players" from a March Madness-style bracket game the Washington Post presented. There's 64 of them in the bracket, but I eliminated the ones who are total stretches, like one of the flight attendants from the plane who never made it to the island, people obviously added just to pad out the bracket.

Jack, Jin, Sun, Sayid, Michael, Locke, Walt, Aaron, Kate, Claire, Rose, Bernard, Hurley, Sawyer, Charlie, Ana Lucia, Daniel Faraday, Mr. Eko, Arzt (the guy who went boom with the dynamite), Shannon, Boone, Libby, Ben, Juliet, Mr. Friendly, Jacob (ha), Penny, Desmond, Rousseau

Okay, here are a list of characters I don't particularly think I'm like: Jack, Jin, Sun, Sayid, Michael, Locke, Walt, Aaron, Bernard, Hurley, Sawyer, Charlie, Ana Lucia, Mr. Eko, Shannon, Boone, Libby, Ben, Juliet, Mr. Friendly, Jacob, Desmond.

That leaves: Kate, Claire, Rose, Faraday, Arzt, Penny, Rousseau.

Yeah, mostly women, but I don't really identify with the male characters on this show.

Kate is in the list because if someone hurt my mom, I can see myself being driven to an extreme reaction. I don't think I'm particularly Kate-like otherwise. I'm certainly not as blindly brave as she is, for one.

Claire parallels are slightly less slim, as she sort of twisted around in her life until she had a child and found a direction for herself. I wasn't quite as shiftless and purposeless as Claire was, though, so I think I'll have to eschew Claire as well.

Rose is in the list just because she's the married lady. She's pretty set, she understands where she is and what she has. She wants to help out but has reservations and worries when Bernard is in harm's way. Some of that reminds me of me, but not much else, in the final analysis.

Faraday is weird and spacey. He has strange ideas and pursues them, usually not connecting with most of the people around him unless they intersect with the ideas he's pursuing in his own mind. I've been like that at times, but I don't think I'm quite the misanthrope that he is.

Rousseau is in the list solely because I know I'd be completely crazy if someone took the B from me, especially if I knew where she was but just couldn't get her back. Other than that, though, I don't think I'm that similar to Rousseau. I would never have taken the chances that she's taken, and I don't know if I have her savagery in me.

Arzt is included because he was sort of on the outer orbit of things. He wasn't right in the center of stuff, but interjected himself when he felt he had something relevant to do. I'm frequently more of an outside observer who sometimes sticks her nose in to say something relevant and then skitters off to be more on the outside again. And of course, he had horrible luck, which is the way I've felt many times as well. There's another character on the show who can sort of be described this way, though, but with some important differences that I think I'm more similar to.

And that's Penny. I'm the one who's usually close to things without being directly involved. I think I have her capacity to get angry and act on it, to become tired of someone's shenanigans and hold a grudge, but I think I also have something like the determination it's taken her to keep looking for Desmond.

But I dunno. Maybe I'm totally off. Maybe the characters on 'Lost' are too strange to resemble anyone in the real world.