Women and Politics

For my new job (to start in August) I have to sign and have notarized a security form in which I swear that I do not and have not (for the past ten years) belonged to any club, group, or organization which planned to overthrow the US or Georgian government. Now, I haven't, but two things come to mind as I think about signing this document: Joseph McCarthy and Delores Umbridge.

And from there, my mind begins to spiral. The policing of ideas is horribly frightening to me, and I have to squirm a little bit when I think how easily I will sign this form without protest. I am participating in my own gagging.

What, you are beginning to wonder, does this have to do with women?

Well, I've started reading a new blog: Tiny Cat Pants where the writer has inspired me to think about how feminism works in life (rather than just how it informs my work). I find myself wondering, in a world that is STILL run by conservative white men, who am I? TCP has a great post about women's writing (or women writing themselves) that I think everyone should read. Not that I want to police your thoughts. :)

So, if a blog is a way that we (women) can write ourselves, what is it that I am writing? Cute stuff about dogs and travel? Is that who I am? While I have strong political beliefs, I've always fallen short of really articulating those ideas here.

I have work to do. So, be prepared for a little less fluff -- or I hope -- and a little more academics here. In her article "The Laugh of the Medusa," Helene Cixous says:

I shall speak about women's writing: about what it will do. Woman must write her self: must write about women and bring women to writing, from which they have been driven away as violently as from their bodies -- for the same reasons, by the same law, with the same fatal goal. Woman must put herself into the text -- as into the world and into history -- by her own movement.

Where to go?

As C and I discuss our next vacation, we have started thinking about what things we want to do before we die. So, here are two questions for everyone to answer (either here or on your own blog). You have been tagged.

What are your top 10 places/things to see that you have not already seen?

Here are mine:

1) The Great Wall of China (to do next year! )
2) The pyramids in Egypt
3) Machu Picchu in Peru
4) Florence and Rome (the Colosseum) , Italy
5) Glaciers and the northern lights in Alaska
6) The Great Barrier Reef in Australia
7) Victoria Falls in Zimbabwe
8) The Golden Gate Bridge and San Francisco
9) Mount Everest (not to climb, though) in Nepal
10) Volcanoes in Hawaii

What are the 5 things that you have already seen that you most recommend?

Mine:
1) Stonehenge
2) The Grand Canyon
3) Toyko, Japan and Mount Fuji (should be climbed)
4) New York City, USA
5) Paris, France


Funny, how much harder that was than I thought it would be. My first list could have easily been twice that long.

Your turn...

Talking to God

Because I am tired again today, I am giving my space over again to someone else. Today I want to share a great Bright Eyes Song.

You can watch him sing it on Leno through the download link under "Bright Eyes" on the Saddle Creek website.

"When The President Talks To God"

When the president talks to God
Are the conversations brief or long?
Does he ask to rape our women’s' rights
And send poor farm kids off to die?
Does God suggest an oil hike
When the president talks to God?

When the president talks to God
Are the consonants all hard or soft?
Is he resolute all down the line?
Is every issue black or white?
Does what God say ever change his mind
When the president talks to God?

When the president talks to God
Does he fake that drawl or merely nod?
Agree which convicts should be killed?
Where prisons should be built and filled?
Which voter fraud must be concealed
When the president talks to God?

When the president talks to God
I wonder which one plays the better cop
We should find some jobs. the ghetto's broke
No, they're lazy, George, I say we don't
Just give 'em more liquor stores and dirty coke
That's what God recommends

When the president talks to God
Do they drink near beer and go play golf
While they pick which countries to invade
Which Muslim souls still can be saved?
I guess god just calls a spade a spade
When the president talks to God

When the president talks to God
Does he ever think that maybe he's not?
That that voice is just inside his head
When he kneels next to the presidential bed
Does he ever smell his own bullshit
When the president talks to God?

I doubt it

I doubt it
----------------------------------

Update:

This song is a free download from I-tunes.

A Good Poem

advice

by Ntosake Shange

from Nappy Edges (1978)

people keep telling me to put my feet on the ground

i get mad & scream/ there is no ground

only shit pieces from dogs horses & men who dont live

anywhere/ they tell me think straight & make myself

somethin/ i shout & sigh/ i am a poet/ i write poems/

i make words/ cartwheel & somersault down pages

outta my mouth come visions distilled like bootleg

whisky/ i am like a radio but i am a channel of my own

i keep sayin i do this/ & people keep askin what am i gonna do/

what in the hell is goin on?

did somebody roll over the library wittta atomic truck

did hitler really burn all the books/ it’s true

nobody in the united states can read or understand

english anymore/ i must have been the last survivor of

a crew from mars/ this is where someone in brown cacky comes

to arrest me & green x-ray lights come outta my eyes & i

can leap over skyscrapers & fly into the night/ i can be

sure no one will find me cuz i am invisible to

ordinary human beings in the u.s.a./ there are no poets

who go to their unemployment officer/ sayin i wanna put

down my profession as ‘poet’/ they are sure to send you to

another office/ the one for aid to totally dependent persons/

people keep tellin me these are hard times/ what are you gonna be

doin ten years from now/ what in the hell do you think/ i

am gonna be writin poems/ i will have poems/ inchin u p the

walls of the lincoln tunnel/ i am gonna feed my children poems on

rye bread with horseradish/ i am gonna send my mailman off

with a poem for his wagon/ give my doctor a poem for his heart/

i am a poet/ i am not a part-time poet/ i am not an amateur

poet/ i dont even know what that person cd be/ whoever that

is authorizing poetry as an avocation/ is a fraud/

put yr own feet on the ground/ writers dont have to plan

another existence forever to live schizophrenically/ to

be jane doe & medea in one body/

i have had it/ i am not goin to grow up to be somethin else

i am goin to be ol & grey wizened & wise as aunt mamie/

i am gonna write poems til i die & when i have gotten outta

this body i am gonna hang round in the wind & know over

everybody who got their feet on the ground/ i’ma let you

run wild/ & leave a poem or two with king kong

in his aeroplane to drop pieces of poems

so you all will haveta come together/ just to figure out/

how you got so far away/ so far away from words

however/ did you capture language/ is a free thing.

After shocks and starting again

Well, as fun as it was, my body hurts. Such is the price I pay to be fat and lazy.

Today I am moving slowly. I'm looking through the photos I took and wondering why my flash wasn't working. Everything is blurry. Oh well.

We had a new moon last night. I am ready to begin a new chapter. I have a bulk of paperwork to fill out for my new job in the fall. Newness has its drawbacks. My muscles wonder if wakeboarding will be their new sport. I keep telling them to relax.

I will begin again. Writing all day, yoga in the afternoon, Jon Stewart by 11:00 pm. Same old pattern. My muscles will find their old strengths.

Quotes from one of the best movies ever made Adaptation:

Charlie Kaufman: To begin... To begin... How to start? I'm hungry. I should get coffee. Coffee would help me think. Maybe I should write something first, then reward myself with coffee. Coffee and a muffin. So I need to establish the themes. Maybe a banana nut. That's a good muffin.

------------------------

Charlie Kaufman: [voice-over] I'm pathetic, I'm a loser. I have failed, I am panicked. I've sold out, I am worthless, I... What the fuck am I doing here? What the fuck am I doing here? Fuck. It is my weakness, my ultimate lack of conviction that brings me here. Easy answers used to shortcut yourself to success. And here I am because my jump into the abysmal well - isn't that just a risk one takes when attempting something new? I should leave here right now. I'll start over. I need to face this project head on and...
Robert McKee: ...and God help you if you use voice-over in your work, my friends. God help you. That's flaccid, sloppy writing. Any idiot can write a voice-over narration to explain the thoughts of a character.

-------------------------

John Laroche: Then one morning, I woke up and said, "Fuck fish." I renounce fish, I will never set foot in that ocean again. And there hasn't been a time where I have stuck so much as a toe back in that ocean.
Susan Orlean: But why?
John Laroche: Done with fish.

Celebrate

What do you get when you cross chicken enchiladas with




and then the next day you add




and


?????

A weekend celebration with Ang and Haley.

Should be killer. Here's a toast (with Mojitos, of course) to chapter endings, weekends, puppy dogs, and great food.

USA lost, PerryKat finishes Chapter 3

Well, I may be a little ahead of myself. I'm almost finished. I need to do a full reading tomorrow and make sure all of my changes are smooth. But, for the most part, I'm now on my last chapter.

That's right, folks, one more chapter and some revision to make all the parts work as a whole, and I'm done. I mean, I'll have to defend it, and a lot of political dancing will have to occur. But, this is the last lap. Oh, boy. I'll be happy when it is over.

I know there are people out there who have two Ph.D.s. Those people are crazy.

AND

As I worked today, I again watched World Cup matches. The US lost, of course. They weren't even really fun to watch. I kept wondering when they would get moving. Ghana will move on to the next round. Good for them.

What do these have in common, you might wonder. Well, I hope not much, unless I'm Ghana in the metaphor. The little country that could. The only African country left in the World Cup. But, I don't feel much like an underdog, even if I come from working class people. I just think that there is a closure on two things, and closure is important to me.

Closure is how things such as Ph.D.s or marathons happen. If you couldn't count off the miles (or at least the hours) as you ran, you might quit long before the finish line. I need every little notch I can get, because the road is long, the mountain is high, the degree is exhausting.

Championships like the World Cups are also endurance tests. Each game has 90 minutes of pain. But each round brings more games, more injuries, more fatigue. Here's to those who move on to the next round (or chapter).

I'll celebrate this weekend...more on that tomorrow.

oh, the heat

Today is the summer solstice. The season changes.

It is 95 degrees (with 19% humidity) here in Georgia. I remember telling myself when I lived in Tucson (where today it is 98 degrees with 19% humidity, not much different, huh?) that I would never again complain about the heat in the south. So, I'm not complaining -- just stating facts. It is hot.

I watched another World Cup match today -- Mexico lost to Portugal 1-2. The air conditioning is nice. All the commentators on ESPN could talk about was tomorrow's USA match. We have no chance. When it was over, I braved the heat and did a few errands. The Japanese woman at the cleaners knows me by name now. We've become at home here. We're not only Americans, we're also Georgians now.

So, today is a new season. A new beginning...a fresh start. I might make a few resolutions... I might not.

I'd like to say I won't complain anymore.
I'd like to promise that I will grow to like where I live.
I'd like to resolve that I will try to concentrate on inner tranquility and peace.

But I know better.

Oh, damn, it is hot.

Parts of the Self

Jebbo said:

being aware that your emotional reaction to things is not you, but is more a bio-chemical shift.

My issue is not with Jebbo's post. He just got me thinking about something that I've been thinking about a lot lately, and off and on for about 12 years. Trying to figure out what "self" is, and how to understand such a SELF in a culture that insists that mind and body are separate.

The thing is, I can't find a line between them. How do we know if the medicated self is The Self (normal or abnormal) or if the unmedicated self is The Self (normal or abnormal). Why is the me with the stomach full of food the "normal" ME? Why not the hungry me?

Either way, the bigger question is that mind/body split that Rene Descartes handed us. "I think therefore I am." What about "I eat, therefore I am?" For those of us without religion, why do we still cling to the idea of a soul separate from the body? Why not see the body/mind/self as an integrated whole?

In Jebbo's example, that would require that we accept both the waiting self and the fulfilled self as parts of the same SELF. It would also require that we understand that the parent that hit us is the same parent that kissed us. The child that screams in a fit is the same child that sleeps peacefully. That the suicidal girl in me is part of the same SELF as the girl focusing on her camel pose.

The bio-chemical shifts are what define us. That we have them makes us US. That I metabolize food slowly, that my chemicals take me on wild highs and lows, that I take particular chemicals to keep me from having children, and other chemicals for all sorts of other things, that I eat lots of sugar, that I am A+ bloodtype, that I have a size 8 foot, and that I believe in peace -- these are all what make me, me.

What makes you you?

:)

Waiting on the Handyman

Yes, it is 8:35 am. I'm on the couch with my computer, wondering where he is. He said he'd be here at 8:30. Nothing is wrong with the house, but we've now been here a year, and the builder does a "complimentary" one year "touch up" on caulking, paint, and other meaningless things.

So, rather than my normal morning routine, where I begin the day slowly and in my pajamas as I read over the work I did on Friday and begin a new paragraph or two, I am dressed and ready for Phoenix to bark when the doorbell rings.

But it hasn't yet. It is now 8:40 am.

What to blog about?

Well -- how about a "Parent-to-be" complaint. I like that we are parents-to-be. But, as we are not parents yet, I found myself uncomfortable when both C and I received mother's/father's day gifts from one well meaning family member. It is bad enough that holidays are every other week -- I find myself living in the card section of Target these days -- but to add us to the list of people who actually have had and raised children when we aren't there yet makes me a little nervous. To give us gifts for things we haven't done yet is like an advance in pay. Now we are obligated to work off the debt. Or so I feel. Maybe I'm too sensitive.

It is now 8:46 am. No doorbell.

Or, I could talk about family dynamics. We all have them. They are all f****d up. Not just mine, either. C & I visited his family recently, and his is the same. Everyone has old patterns that they fall into with parents and siblings. It is funny how hard it is to watch from outside, and to know that C has the same trouble watching me when we visit mine. It takes about two hours of our hometowns in the rearview before my sense of self and calm resurfaces. I asked C on the way home if there are people who have healthy relationships with family. He said that there must be, but that he didn't know anyone.

8:51. Now 8:58.

Man, I hate waiting.

I think that is the thing with both the parent-to-be and the family. It is all a big waiting game. NPR says the average American spends two to three years of life waiting in line. We will spend at least a year in line with CCAA in China. And really, with family, our whole lives are spent waiting...waiting to be older, waiting to have a particular conversation, or waiting to work out a long buried problem. I find myself wishing for the a flash pass for life. If we can pay more and skip the line in Six Flags, why not have that in life too? Well, I guess that wouldn't be fair.

9:05, and the doorbell rings. Yes. I can now go on with my day... oh wait. No, I have to babysit the handyman. So, where was I?

Fair. No, a life flash pass might be nice, but it wouldn't be fair. Pay extra at the DMV and finish before the teenager who can't afford the extra? mmmmm.

So, we wait. Wait in lines, wait emotionally, and wait on our couches for the drilling noises to stop (now 9:11 am). In the mean time, we write blogs and live our lives.

What are you waiting on today?

The New World

I like this movie. I am surprised. But, I find myself wondering if I am naive/exploitive.

I recently watched Terrence Malick's film The New World because it was recommended to me by a friend who has admirable taste in movies. I expected to rip the film apart -- to proclaim at the end of my viewing that this was yet another film to promote the myth of a woman/girl that was so entranced by John Smith she threw herself between him and death. And, the film does do that.

But it is also one of the most beautifully shot films I've ever seen. We are asked to see the land from two points of view: those that lived there and those that settled there. Then we are asked to see the clash of the two cultures. It is this clash that becomes "The New World" not the land itself. Both cultures encountered a New World, and both cultures would be forever changed. And, to save the film from the Disney complex, Malick requires that the unnamed (until she takes on the English name, Rebecca) Pocahontas character become mythic rather than human -- she symbolizes that new world and the horrible pain that it causes.

And while I don't love Collin Farrell, Q'orianka Kilcher is fantastic. She is a pleasure to watch.

Yet, even as I find myself enjoying the movie, I also find myself wondering: is this yet another glorification of the genocide? Am I enjoying their (and my own) pain? As a European-American audience member, when is it okay to enjoy a movie like this? A movie like The Pianist? A photography exhibit like Without Sanctuary?

Where is the ethical line?

Full Moon

Last night the moon was full. Now it will be slowly waning down to the new moon that will come on June 25th, four days after the summer solstice on June 21st. This moon, pictured above as taken from my back deck, is a strawberry moon, according the traditional farmer's almanac.

Now, after spending the better part of an hour reading about lunar cycles, solar calendars, and the mythologies and folklore around each, I found some not-so-interesting information: "some people" believe that all the connections between crazy events and full moons are nonsense. (See the Skeptic's Dictionary). Okay, so I am usually a skeptic, but this one I have to disagree with.

C and I took a short road trip on Saturday and Sunday. We drove four hours each way, mostly on interstate highways. We saw three MAJOR wrecks (several ambulances, destroyed vehicles, and traffic backed up for miles and miles), and we actually witnessed one of the three: a Jeep Cherokee flipping five or six times before it came to rest right-side-up in the grass (no other car was involved that we could see). While this seemed unusual for such a short trip, I did not think anything about the moon during the trip itself.

But as I stepped out onto the deck last night, and I saw that moon, I thought back to all of my years of waiting tables. I believe those writers at the Skeptic's Dictionary need to do some restaurant work, because it would change their minds. I can't count the number of times that the place would be crazy (everything from burnt food to dropped glasses, from customer's irrationality to servers crying in the bathroom) and I would find myself wondering what in the world was going on; then someone would say, "Oh, it's a full moon." The general consensus was life was more crazy during a full moon.

If there is not statistical evidence to support the correlation between human insanity or stupidity and the full moon, I find myself wondering about the reliability of such evidence. People go crazy when the moon is full.

Anyone have anything crazy happy yesterday?

A Poem for your Thoughts

Pantomime Assassin: March 30, 1981

During my sixth grade year, I bubbled with hormones
And squeezed myself inside wooden desks, hot haircuts,
and named-brand denim. I even learned to fake
hatred for my school teacher. As I twisted myself
round to throw off a wandering hand from my bra strap,
a messenger knocked on our door.
The president has been shot, he said, Reagan is shot!

Electric impulses lit up our frozen faces:
unsure whether to smile or shake. They left
us alone, and John sidled over to me,
clenched his palm on my forearm, and asked
in a voice of forced-caring: Are you okay?
I nodded. My thoughts twirled over his fingers
on my arm and my stomach jackknifed. I smiled.
I had learned, like Jodie Foster when she played
the teen prostitute, how to belong to a man.

Someone brought in a television, and we watched;
I studied the fall of James Brady, the face of John Hinkley, Jr.
I learned to call him:
assassin.

Days would pass before the letter appeared.
He wrote to her: I would abandon
the idea of getting Reagan in a second if I
could only win your heart and live out the rest of my life
with you.
I thought of John and his fake concern,
of Sam, Lamar, and Jake on the bus
with their hands, palms up, in the seats where
we wanted to rest after long days,
of Mike and Jim at the skating rink,
begging for one kiss, one touch, just one…

Foster graduated from Yale;
she speaks French fluently; she is one our best actors.
Hinkley adored her in his own way.
President Reagan was one of our most popular presidents.

In a school desk, 1981, I watched TV news footage
and revolted against a single touch that thrilled me
only minutes before. A splitting.
The bus ride home that day was still:
Everyone understood obsession’s outcome.

But it would begin again the following day:
the historical pantomime of grabbing
and pulling away.
My brain split: a rip made like a stray bullet,
flesh torn down the center of my expectations.
Hinkley: my crazed assassinator.

Abandon.

Aging in a Youth Culture

I was -- as I do quite often -- looking at Phoenix today. This is what I saw:



Now, for those of you who don't remember, this is how he looked when he was a puppy:


Phoenix is four and a half now, which makes him about thirty seven in human years. He is, therefore, very near my age. What made me do a little thinking today was his gray hair. Like for me, his weight and his gray hair are telling of his aging body.

And then, there was this other thing that happened yesterday. My yoga instructor had botox injections. In discussing her injections with a few of us students, I found that several of the students that I admire (all of these women are very slim, fit, and seemingly healthy) had had them, and they began a discussion about permanent makeup tattooing. I found myself looking at my face in the mirror for a long time last night. And today, I was looking closely at Phoenix.

I can remember wondering why people color their hair. That was before the gray started. Now I color mine fairly regularly. In ten years when I am the age of my fellow yoginis, will I be trying botox too?

Then, of course, I begin to look at my culture. Why are we afraid of aging? I feel strongly that youth is lost on the young, yet I do color my hair. I met a new doctor the other day who told me that I looked nineteen, and that she couldn't believe my age. I found myself both offended (I mean, do I dress like a 19-year-old idiot?) and pleased (I must be aging gracefully).

Which is it? Much of my youth was spent wanting to be older... wanting to be 14, because that was my lucky number; wanting to be 16 so that I could drive; wanting to be 18 to be out of high school; wanting to be 21 so that I could have a beer. Now here I am, 36, and I'm grateful if someone cards me to buy a bottle of wine.

I have a "friend" who won't admit to ANYONE how old she is. And, she is only my age. Again, I ask myself, why all this hoopla over age?

I guess this is not a new problem, and yet it is new. Less than 200 years ago, at my age I would have been nearing my downward spiral. I would have been ready for my children to care for me rather than only beginning to have children.

I look at the silvery hair now covering a face that was once copper. It is a sign of our years together. It is also a sign that he will not always be here with me. Is that what we are fighting? Our looming ends? Or is it, as I tend to think, that we want to die looking good (like those people on television and movie screens)?

oooh look, I'm up and running

Okay, so I was riding with C through downtown ATL and I saw this bumper sticker. I was not purposefully reading bumper stickers, so as the car sped past us (as happens frequently on I-75/85), I really only caught sight of "Voldemort." Now, being the Potter fan that I am, I quickly put C on the chase: "follow that car" I screamed, and he hit the accelerator. As we caught up, and I read the sticker in its entirety, I found myself laughing in a way I haven't been able to laugh about politics in -- oh, what?-- about 6 years.

Of course, from several car lengths, I did not manage to catch the web address, so I had to do a web search to see where I could find such a wonderful sticker of my own (and a few for my friends). I found it at www.goats.com.

I also found there that the sticker/t-shirt/hoodie takes at least two weeks for delivery. Yea -- that's right, I'm not the only one that finds it funny.

AND, I found the comic strip that inspired it:


Hope you laughed as much as I did.

2-day headache, slow servers, and drive-by bloggers

Well, although I had a BLAST at Six Flags, I've had a headache for two days. Don't know if there is any relationship between the two, but the correlation exists.

I can't seem to load the image I wanted to write about today. The server (either mine or theirs) seems to be (too?) slow, and my headache is keeping me from being patient.

I don't suppose that a silly little post like this will invite any more drive-by bloggers. We'll see.

I'll try again later.

DaVinci versus Jesus???

Okay, so I didn’t plan to post today. I thought to leave you with my ugly photos all weekend. But I went to the doctor a few hours ago (those annoying annual checkups that we women endure at the hands of the all knowing medical field/scientific community), and when I left this van was in the parking lot.

Now, I don’t normally take pictures of cars in parking lots, but this van was so hard for me to believe that I was afraid if I didn’t snap a quick shot, no one else would believe it either.

And speaking of belief…

Okay, so I’m not what anyone would consider religious, although at other times in my life I tried on a few different ones for size. None really fit. But what exactly is going on behind those doors every Sunday? I mean, this person went out and spent money to have this sign made for and applied to his/her car. Is there some belief war that I didn’t know about? Is it Jesus versus Dan Brown? Or worse, Jesus versus DaVinci? Is our taste in fiction now really sending us to hell?

What is going on?

I mean, okay, I read (and to some degree, enjoyed) The DaVinci Code.

****SPOILER ALERT*** (if you don’t know and don’t want to know, skip this paragraph). So, my understanding and memory (it has been a while and I haven’t seen the movie) of the story is that Jesus and Mary Magdalene married and had children, that she was part of the divinity, and that the Church rooted out, covered up, and destroyed all knowledge of that piece of the religion: a sacred feminine, and love and sex as a base of the divine. She is the Holy Grail that has been lost.

Now, let’s just say, FOR A MOMENT, that this STORY is some argument that we are supposed to believe rather than just the work of FICTION that it I thought it was. What is Brown really saying here? It is true that Western culture has suppressed the feminine (divine or otherwise) for at least two thousand years. Many feminists trace the "flight from the feminine" back to Plato and his allegory of the cave (which might be thought of as a metaphor for the womb) where men had to abandon the cave to find Truth (See Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman). Still others point out that Descartes' theory of mind over body connects women to the body and suggests that through reason and rationale thinking that body can be overcome (see Susan Bordo's Flight to Objectivity: Essays on Cartesian Culture). In any case, Christianity has been a large part of that culture that has abandoned and oppressed women. So, perhaps there is a bit of wisdom in the Brown's story.

But it is a novel, not a sacred text. I mean, are there groups of people now building temples to Magdalene? Not that that is a horrible idea, but is this really something Christians should worry themselves over? So, why the sticker on this car?

What is so threatening to Christianity about a sacred feminine? The reaction leaves me contemplating the possibility that Dan Brown has actually struck some deep chord within us (or at least within some crazed Christians).

Is it a positive sign that the church is having to jump into defense? I mean, when I really think about what this sticker says, it seems to suggest that there is a choice in our beliefs, that the Bible may not actually have all the answers.

Am I wrong to see some strange illumination here?

Self portraits and the proverbial thousand words

Having a non-beauty day as I am, and needing a picture for this blog, I did a stupid thing.

I started taking pictures of myself.




Yes, I that's right. And after downloading these beauties to my computer, I found that while I look quite atrocious, some interesting things showed up:

Those were the first three I took, and they were taken in order. Notice that it doesn't occur to me to smile until the third picture. Also notice that I didn't bother to get out of bed, get dressed, brush my hair, or put on make-up. Finally, I think my eyes are quite scary. A bit intense for an empty room and camera.

After looking over these photos, I decided I was quite a boring subject, so I tried a few with the only living creature around: Phoenix. These are more interesting to me:




These actually seem like better self-portraits to me. First, my eyes don't seem quite as forbidding. Maybe I'm just better in profile. But something in me thinks that Pullman has his finger on an idea: daemons. Phoenix is mine. Without him, my photos are incomplete.