A piece of my soul

[matthewdaly]

Barring any surprises, the facility enumerating phase of my Census work ended this afternoon. Then more training next week (with our team being split into as many as twenty-one pieces waaaaah) for the door to door operation. It was a lot of fun, being a beautiful day and kind of a FUBAR dorm to count so we stretched out the schedule to make a few final passes of the floors that we were assigned to maximize our count and put off the inevitable breakup for an extra half hour.

But something happened. Yesterday I went through my floor interviewing the people I could find and leaving forms for the people I couldn't, except there was one woman who I met that was too busy for the interview so I left her the form. So I come around this afternoon to pick up the forms, and hers has a post-it note saying that she's a photography major and would I mind if she took some pictures of me?

And, I, uh, well, huh.

I know my powers of self-image are totally borked, and also that I'm not a horrific looking person especially if I make an effort to clean myself up. I can smile at babies in checkout lines and they smile back, so I'm aware that I'm not a freak. But I never like pictures of me. I don't know if it's the freezing in time or the perspective switch needed to form a two-dimensional image, but I can pretty much count the number of pictures of adult me that I've liked on one finger. In fact, the very reason I don't have a userpic here or on my LJ despite having a digital camera and a USB port is that this process is one of the things that I'm afraid of.

I'm going to sleep on it, but I think I'm going to agree to her proposal. I'm certain to learn something. But I can't stop looking at my bottle of clonazepam and asking WTF is in these pills that I could think of agreeing to model for a woman that I only met for twenty seconds. Strange days indeed.

Comments

[piranha]

like you i have very few pictures of myself that i like, and i usually stay out of even group pictures. the only sorta fight the paramour and i ever had was over a sniggler group photo at a fermi lab trip, *snrk* -- he didn't realize that i was NOT coyly kidding when trying to hide, and tried to push me into it. it's not that i actually believe a picture takes one's soul, but i feel as if that were true; something is always so wrong with photographical depictions of me that it seems there is no soul in them; it disappeared when the shutter clicked.

no pro by any stretch of the imagination has ever asked to take my picture. i wonder what i'd do. i'd probably agree, but i'd definitely want to know what the photos are gonna be used for. and probably wouldn't allow nudes, *heh*. but i'd be willing to do weird of any sort. because art is different anyway, and i might find it interesting.

if she wants to take your picture, she probably sees something there. it'd be interesting if you can see what she sees afterwards.

[matthewdaly]

Alas, as it turns out I am not ready to make the connection yet. But it's going on the list of things I want to be able to do. I guess knowing is half the battle.

Besides, I'm sure there are federal regulations prohibiting me from fraternizing with the people I enumerate. Yeah, that's it....