What's At The Back of My Head

I don't know if it's true, but years ago (like, twenty years ago), one of my English profs and I were talking about Thomas Pynchon and my English prof told me that Pynchon's first book, V., was published with a photo of Pynchon in that place on the back flap of the book cover where they put the author's picture and a little blurb, like, "Thomas Pynchon lives on Mars with his wife and three robots"--or whatever. You know what I mean, right? Well, Pynchon is incredibly reclusive (only a handful of published photos exist of the guy) and so his photo was of the back of his head. It didn't show his face at all.

I loved that.

So that up there is a photo of the back of my head. Yes, that's my hair messily pulled back into a clip. (I'm thrilled that my hair has grown out long enough to pull back this way.) David took that photo while we were out for a walk with Kelly First. I cropped Kelly and the crane we were looking at out of the photo, leaving just the back of my head.

I know: Yawn.

One of the reasons I posted it, though, is not because I love Thomas Pynchon so much that I wanted to emulate him, but because when I first saw that picture, I thought: Ugh. I look terrible. I seriously looked at a picture of the back of my head and immediately thought, ugh, what a terrible picture of me.

Ha! Right? What a terrible picture of the back of my head? I mean, who cares, right?

I don't take a good picture, really. At least, I don't think I do. Take this photo, taken perhaps four years ago, as yet another example. This is me, dancing at a wedding with my friend Lu. Lu has her back to the camera and I am the nerd all in black. (Lu was showing me how to do some dance and I was laughing at what a klutz I am at dancing and Dave, ever helpful even mid-meltdown, took this photo.)



Recently, in one of the wretched journals I found in the storage unit, I came across something I wrote about the wedding, about how fat and ugly I looked in all the photos taken at the wedding.

Yes, that is a size eight skirt pinned in the back because it was too large and I was afraid it was going to fall off me while I was dancing. Yes, I am wearing all black as part of an effort to appear even thinner. Yes, I'm smiling, but that was only incidental.

That was the wedding where I had a meltdown about the food. Here's what I wrote about that:

I was still overweight despite the fact that I had so little body fat that my period had stopped several months before. In an effort to keep hunger pangs at bay and stick to my diet, I started smoking again and was drinking about three gallons of water and two 2-L bottles of diet Coke a day. I was determined to continue losing weight.

During that time, I went to a friend’s wedding. It was a late afternoon wedding which meant that dinner was served. I don’t remember what was served, I just remember looking down at a plate of things that I couldn’t eat and still maintain my diet.

And just for laffs, this is a photo of the dinner served at the wedding:



Am I missing something or does wedding food, by law, have to be craptacular? Because I'm sure it wasn't cheap, but it sure was nasty.

Tutored

So I spent a few hours tutoring my niece in chemistry yesterday. One of the first things she said to me when we met was that now she understands what the teacher is talking about in lecture. She sounded so happy when she said it that I was glad for all the time we've spent working together. She's also doing a lot more homework on her own (which makes my job easier) and going to see the teacher during office hours. (She bragged about our study sessions so much that the teacher asked her for tips on how to improve the class, which also made my niece very happy.)

I was telling Kelly First and Kevin about our tutoring sessions and how I was trying to talk to my niece about the concept of density by talking about things that are more and less dense. I asked my niece what I thought was an easy question: Which is more dense, a gas or a solid? (The answer, by the way, is that solids are more dense than gasses.) My niece replied that a gas is more dense than a solid. I repeated the question, thinking that maybe she had heard me say less dense, but she maintained that gasses are more dense than solids. I said, "Well, you know when someone doesn't understand something and you say that they're dense?" She said, "Yeah." I said, "Why do you think they say someone like that is dense?" And she said, "Because they're an airhead."

Oh, right.

I'm pretty tough on my niece when we study, but I also want her to know that, with enough work, she can succeed at this class. It might be a bit disastrous, too much of self-esteem hit, for her to fail this class. So we study.

What Else?

Here's a couple of random things:

I started a list the other day of deep-fried foods that I've eaten. The list included Twinkies and alligator and chicken cartilage. I like deep-fried things.

Last night at the gym, the cardio seemed easy for once. Cardio never seems easy because I usually have to wrestle The Brain to the ground. Seriously. The Brain never shuts up while we're doing cardio. It's like having a bored kid in the backseat on a long road trip. (Are we done yet? Do we have to do this? Can we stop? This is boring.) But last night, The Brain was, all, meep. Not a peeparino out of The Brain for forty minutes. It was like manna from heaven practically.