The unseasonably warm weekend in New York City offers me a chance to get re-acquainted to some of my spring wardrobe, including a denim jacket I’ve had for years.  And this, it turns out, affords me a greater level of recognizance:

“Are you Chris DeWan?,” someone asked me at a party last night.  “I recognize you from your avatar!”

It turns out that this friend-of-a-friend had seen the cartoon-like image that I use, on and off, as a Facebook profile picture.

It made me happy to hear: I’m not very photogenic, and I’ve long believed that this avatar looks more like me than any photo, and indeed, maybe looks more like me than me.

Before you argue that this is impossible (unless I actually look like a two-dimensional, color-saturated anime character), consider that police in Kanagawa, Japan recently released a wanted poster for a man wanted in connection with a hit-and-run — and rather than depend on the work of their usual sketch artist, they instead used a Nintendo Wii to create a look-alike avatar of the suspect.

(There’s some fun irony in knowing that the original Sanskrit word avatāra described a god taking physical form and descending into the “lower realms,” and now instead the term describes a practice that  is often about removing our corporeal blemishes and then uploading this purer form of ourselves to the “higher” realms of the Internet…)