Every once in a while I get overwhelmed by just how many humans there are

I’m growing a deep affection for these list-based memes that float around youtube and facebook and livejournal and etc: ten things you don’t know about me, twenty books I’ve read, 51 things I own, all of them.

Individually there’s no reason they should be interesting to anyone who doesn’t already personally know the person engaging in the meme — and for the most part that’s all who will see them, except on those rare occasions when some aggregator like MeFi chooses to dragnet a handful up into more public view.

But collectively they turn into more than just lists. They become these little formalized packets of identity. Structured ways for all these countless individuals to say to the world “this is me. This is who I am.”