"What image do you have of yourself?"

 Part of this book about dealing with idolatry has a questionnaire about how to identify idols.  A question about self imagine came up.  I don't know how to succintly answer it so here's me typing up a blogpost about it....

I see myself as young and kind of a rebel, an okay-y guy, sorta, a deconstructing sort, always trying to make sure his i's are crossed, etc., always re-thinking things and double checking...  but often getting his priorities out of sorts.  re-thinking things always, but not always re-thinking the things he should be re-thinking........  Getting lost in the small things.  Disorganized in thought.  

Not sure what else to say about how I see myself.  I don't know what to say about my future self (it was actually two questions in one bullet point).  I've never met him, nor have I heard anything about him.  I imagine my future self will be older.  Hopefully I'll be wiser....

Would it were NOT true?!

 "If only it were true"
"He says it as if it were true"

I can't recite the exact function of words like "would", "were", "it", "and" etc...but I know damn well "would it were true" is nothing more than a mishmash of words.  They try to justify its existence as "The subjunctive mood".  WTF?  Is that a sophisticated way of saying "incoherent mutter"?

But given that it seems to be a very commonly used incoherent mutter, it seems maybe I'm also the only one who thinks the sentence that opens this Facebook post could benefit from some re-wording.

It SEEMS, based on the way I learned how to talk (American English), that it SHOULD say "Van Gogh, in being himself, resulted in distinction and success,..."  I have no idea how to read that sentence without pretending it has a different sequence of words on the page.  When I first tried reading that, I went through it 3 times and had to go backwards and see if I missed something.  I've learned through reading broken English all over the web that if you just continue looking at the other words used, you can figure out what the author was probably trying to convey.