Review 2010: The Opinion Engine: 2/31: Who is the real Stuart Ian Burns ? (from Jen in the comments)

Psychology He is a failure. He’s socially inept, tiresome, fundamentally disappointing when you meet him and swiftly outstays his welcome. He’s never entirely sure how far to take a conversation and has the suspicion that he’s often still talking well past the moment when interesting becomes boring becomes can I leave now please? That’s because he desperately wishes that he was more intelligent and erudite than he is, that he’d read more of the right kinds of books so that consequently he’d have the ability to speak with fluidity on subjects that matter rather than those that probably don’t. In other words, he’s constantly in a state of over-compensating.

He’s also physically repulsive, the kind of person fellow passengers on buses do their utmost to avoid sitting next to and who leads to tutting when he sits next to them. His smile is creepy.  He has a big nose.  His hair is never quite right because he has an oddly shaped head which is too small on top and over big at the bottom. He’s never particularly had any dress sense, favouring a tie-dyed multicoloured shirt and blue polyester jacket as his undergraduate apparel, polo-shirts through the late nineties and has now settled on white t-shirts and the kinds of jeans he's always worn, only rarely varying the colour of a jumper when necessary.  He’s also scruffy.

He lacks ambition. His self-esteem issues stretch back many years and to such a degree that he de-values his own achievements and is self-deprecating to a fault. He’s too busy explaining why he can’t do something to notice what he can accomplish, wallowing in pity to such an extent that he’s stagnating. He’s even answering this question in the third person in an attempt to disassociate himself from himself but knows that despite the self-flagellation he’s purposefully not really answering the question anyway. He knows that all of the above is open to change but lacks the initiative or drive to go through with any of it.  He's tired, jaded and scared.