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Photos (and other things)
If you're wondering why this page takes so long to load, it's because it's mostly photos.
"I hate using this QuickCam. I had forgotten how much I hate using it. It is the single most unflattering camera known to man. I don't even know why I'm bothering."
"Hey, that's not a bad angle. There might be something to that. Let me try it again while I'm looking at the camera."
"Ooh, that's halfway decent. Of course, my stubble still glows in the dark, but some things are too much to hope for ...."
Actually, those three were taken in a row ... but you're only getting half the story. I took fifteen pictures, and then culled them down to the five on this page, of which one (the last one on the page) is wonderful, three (the three above) are adequate, and one (the colored one) is ... interesting.
It's not that I'm vain, as I've said a few thousand times. It's that I'm not happy with what I've got.
Which reminds me, I wrote an article for this month's Scarlet Letters which you might be interested in reading. It's about genderbending as a form of body alteration.
Here's a close-up I've colored. Believe it or not, I think I've done a good job of capturing my actual coloration here.
I got a parking ticket today. I'm not normally thrilled to get a ticket (darned street sweeping, can never remember which side of the street I'm supposed to be on) but this one might have been worth it. They've gotten technology! The tickets are now printed by a little handheld gizmo. No more having to read illegible handwriting! Furthermore - get this - the paper is plastic-coated on one side, which means that the ticket no longer dissolves into a soggy mess when they stick it under your wiper blade and it rains - as it did today - and you don't fetch it until you get home from work in the evening.
Karen, who's happily married to a Swede, sent me the following comments about their culture, which I reproduce with her permission:
Swedes do have a fascinating culture when it comes to gender roles and such. I don't know how much comes through in your book; you have to kind of experience it in action in the country to realise how deep it runs. It's not that women are Valued Highly or that they are Strong, Tough Heroines Who Stand Up To Their Men (see Steel Magnolias). What really hit me, when I understood what I was experiencing, was the absence of the need for such attitudes, which are after all just reactions to imbalances, and continuations of those imbalances. In Sweden there's a basic sturdiness in women which I've never seen elsewhere. It's not that gender roles don't exist, but they just don't take them as seriously as we do here. Underneath it all is a true and calm awareness that both sexes are human first, gender second. Makes me even more keenly aware of the lack of that here.
The thing is, as I replied to her, that was exactly the impression I was getting from the folktales - I just wasn't sure how to put it into words. Fortunately, Karen did it so eloquently that I am using hers instead.
Needless to say, as I told her, I find that culture very attractive.
I don't have anything else to say today, except that I took the photos because TeKay wanted to see what my eyebrows looked like. Here's one for you, TeKay. It's the only one I'd put up on my wall. Proof that even a QuickCam can get it right once in a while.
© Columbine
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