I was in the back seat, aged perhaps 10, and dad was driving. I don't remember where we were headed, but for some reason I do remember that my eyes were on the few magazines that had been stuffed in the seat pocket. Dad had put on Faust, a new Randy Newman tape that he'd been listening to all week, exhorting anyone who happened to be within earshot to "just listen to these lyrics!" Although the instruction had never really been directed towards me, there I was, dutifully listening to the lyrics. We kept on driving, and I kept on listening and during one of the later songs - a sort of nostalgic love ballad sung by an operatic female lead - I remember not just listening to but comprehending a whole line: "and he's got this lazy little smile he stole from a movie he saw." I stared at the magazines with a new intensity. You can steal a smile?

God knows why, but this notion took root, though wasn't until a few years later that I remember attempting the wholesale robbery of a smile. I was in the driver's seat this time, on my way home from what must have been the second or third of the Bond movies that starred Pierce Brosnan. In it, Brosnan had this one, heavily used facial affect - I can't really say it was pure smile - that struck me as extremely debonaire. It was a combination move, the smile had to be introduced with a beat of silence, followed by a little "hmm" and a nod that clearly signaled both aloofness and total control of the situation. All the beautiful women swooned. I remember acknowledging even then that the key to success was probably being Pierce Brosnan in a tuxedo, but I was an optimistic teenager. I tried it out in the rearview mirror. I squinted. I raised an eyebrow. I let out a "hmm". I began using it in school the next day.

As far as I can tell, some version of this story is how everyone pieces together the person that the rest of the world knows and sees and interacts with. Steal, revise, incorporate. Kids do it naturally. Adults, craftily. If you're too obvious about the lift, you'll get laughed at or chided or whispered about behind your back, but even the norm enforcers doing the chiding have a model in mind; an argument or template that came from someone else for being the way they are. In my case, the fact that I was introduced to the whole practice through a metaphor like robbery has given it a bizarre moral dimension; one that I only recently have come to realize sounds extremely preachy and holier-than-thou when expressed out loud.

That being the case, I have largely kept quiet over the years about what has become an extraordinarily long list of robberies from movie stars, family members, girlfriends, best friends, passing acquaintances, favorite authors and neighbors. My normally terrible memory, which refuses to hold on to what happened yesterday, let alone last year, has crystal clear recall when it comes to the crime scene and victim. It's not complete, mind you, but really brazen transgressions - the shoplifts that occur right there in the moment - are each accompanied with a name, face and little slice of security camera footage, as I watch myself sprint off with a beloved fragment.

A brief taste: My refusal to wear white socks, my habit of prefacing jokes with "exactly". My utter inability to take anyone wearing loafers seriously. Packing sunscreen. The way I end written sentences. The way I end spoken sentences. Olive tapenade. The way I draw hair with ballpoint pens. My fondness for green canvas jackets, replaced recently by a fondness for black leather ones. My tendency to push dinnertable conversations to questions of social justice. The way I crack my knuckles sideways. These essays. The way those dinnertable conversations are careful to never cause anyone any real discomfort. Boots instead of shoes. That one joke about the black lamborghini and the night vision goggles. The way I spin a pen around my right thumb. Kale. My tendency to illustrate letters, or my insistence that anyone, bar-none, can learn to draw well. My desire to learn Spanish. My use of words like "syntactic" or "lexical" in sentences. That little noise I make at the back of my throat when I think. My insistence on making the bed. My insistence on ordering Jamison on the rocks. My instance on eating whole grain bread. Tearing chapters out of guidebooks after I've been to those places. E.B. White. Techniques for non-awkward cocktail conversation. The claim that Steely Dan is a great band.

Engraved in each little shard is a name and moment that come to mind whenever I catch myself being me. And if you're thinking that this is a ridiculous list and an even more ridiculous habit, no need to tell me twice. In the era of open source and creative commons and facebook shares and retweets (and a whole universe of instantaneous reuse and reattribution of everyone's material) who the hell cares? And what's more, isn't caring at all just a means of alienating yourself from your own identity? Attribute too much you to others and you're just left feeling like a sham; a ragdoll of poorly sewn together scraps.

And, well, yes. There is that.

But the upshot is significant. In quiet moments, when you wander back through this cavern of spoils, piled high with the purloined pieces of your patched-together psyche, you get to marvel at how lucky you are to have felt so close to so many people. There is an intimacy in appropriation; a twisted sort of nearness that occurs when you engage in this kind of plagiarism, and perhaps as a result you're a little more forgiving, a little more aware of other brains out there gathering up the same pieces in different ways. (Example: a brain that over-attributes might be more neurotic, but it's also one that is absolutely terrible at holding on to grudges: the memory of thanks endures far longer than the memory of offense ever could.)

This list can't end - at this point the method is pretty much hard-wired - but it can begin (did in fact) and that beginning is probably where the greatest thanks should be directed. Not to Pierce Brosnan (though that smile did a nice job of keeping me celibate through high school), not to Randy Newman (though god knows he deserves it), and not even to the untold number of benefactors who I profited from before I was even conscious of the debt. No, the thanks should be directed towards dad, who, without knowing it, spent most of my childhood driving home the most important lesson of all : just listen.