A Thousand Words

It’s been said that a photo is worth a thousand words. Recently, I traveled to Washington with My Other. While there, The Other took it upon himself to record every moment of the trip in a photojournalistic fashion. The resulting photos could fill volume upon volume of scrapbooks, and have communicated thousands of words to me, the viewer. Rest assured that I have – through the magic of the “delete” option - forever silenced a number of these digital critics. Still, the power of their communication has caused me to reevaluate a number of things.

According to photos 11-17, photo 22, photos 78-104, and countless others of the hundreds of photos, I have a bald spot. This bald spot was not revealed to me by the back-stabbing mirror in my bathroom, but the photos feel that it’s best that I face reality. To be fair, a human viewer may not refer to the spot as being “bald,” but that’s why we must rely on photos for honest opinions, isn’t it? This spot has been brought on by a stressful couple of years (yes, I’m one of those people whose head – under times of duress – dramatically flings the hair off of itself, announcing its internal commotion in a most annoyingly external fashion) and by the fact that I’ve let the part have its own way for far too long. It appears that hair is actually supposed to be managed, not allowed to manage itself. Clearly it’s not responsible enough for that.

Once faced with this reality, I felt obligated to do something about it. (Another reason to not allow anyone to take photos of you, in my opinion.) Cut to two days after my return from Washington, where I could be found in an elevated chair, facing my reflection in a mirror, describing with great enthusiasm the mystery of the disappearing hair. Dean, my hairdresser, was most sympathetic. Yes, he could see the problem. Yes, I am one of those people whose head turns on them under stress. Yes, he could envision a solution. Do I like the current length of my hair, he wonders. Why yes, I do, but I suppose if it needs a little more shape it could be “cleaned up….” Half an hour later, many inches of my hair lay strewn about the floor around us. Initially concerned, I remembered how my hair has betrayed me in the past and felt a smidgen of satisfaction. Ha, I thought. See if you can jump off my head now, why don’t you?

My new prescription for a non-bald head involves moving the part around, and cutting back on stress. Since life consistently interferes with the second part of this prescription, I’ve decided to focus my efforts on moving the part. This is not as easy as it might sound, particularly as I have no patience for the blow-dryer and a very low tolerance for styling products. Without these coaxing tools, my hair seems to believe that it has the right to go where it would like to. Where it would like to go, of course, is exactly where it’s been going for the past six months – into the position that allows for maximum exposure of my bald spot. Traitorous strands of protein.

As if the hair deficiency weren’t bad enough, the photo collection teamed up to kick me while I was already down. “Ha!” they laughed, “Look at you! Could stand to lose a few, couldn’t you??” Scanning through the photos that were still on the camera, in the presence of The Other, I could already sense the snickering of the pixels. “Why,” I fumed, directing my anger at His Otherness, “Didn’t you tell me how bad those jeans were?”
In this time of extreme need, he had let me down. For some incomprehensible reason, the condo in which we were staying had not a single full-length mirror. All mirrors ended at approximately the level of my waist - clearly a dangerous place to stop reviewing one’s appearance. How could I have been expected to know that the jeans that I wore were not, in fact, slimming AT ALL? The deceptive and evil mirror in my own apartment had never let me in on this secret. Of course, now I know that my mirror has a vendetta against me, but prior to this trip I never suspected…

Now I was facing the consequences of my naïve trust. Here was the evidence of the look which I had been sporting – unaware – ALL DAY. It could most accurately be described as “voluminous, strangely bulging denim pants topped with putrid unflattering sleeveless flour sack.” Not the style that I had been hoping for. To drive the final nail into the coffin of my self-esteem, the eight-month pregnant (yet bizarrely slender) woman posing next to me was probably 2/3 of my size, even if you included her unborn child.

Naturally, I’ve had to begin an emergency weight loss plan. This plan involves, primarily, me feeling miserable and refusing to go near a camera ever again. On occasion, it inspires fitful bouts of exercise, during which I curse digital photos and obsess over the photos on other people’s cameras. Photos which, I now think suspiciously, have never been revealed to me.

Fortunately for me, I’ve never been one to spend too much time fixated on any single problem – not when there is such a plethora to choose from. In short time, I know, I’ll have moved from these issues to another topic. Perhaps that strange pain that I’ve been feeling in my neck lately. I once had a friend who had torn an artery in her neck, and didn’t even realize it… I knew someone else who had broken his neck – and didn’t find out for THREE DAYS! Ouch! The pain is definitely getting worse….