For the time being, since I find myself on the fence about posting to the blog I think maybe I shall just clean out innumerable drafts and finish up snippets of things...
False vanity.
I’ve let my hair grow long, way long. So amazingly long, it goes down below the shoulder blades of my back.
I don’t think much about it. I don’t think much about the way I look anymore until I see a picture of myself and I cringe not knowing who that person is staring back at me in the photo. I ask myself, ‘Is that me? Do I really look like that?’
Then again, I’ve always been like that.
I mean, I don’t have a really sense of how the world around me perceives me. I don’t know if other people have better senses of themselves or not. We are all of us carried about in bags of flesh, housing whatever electrical impulses there are that make each of us unique.
I look back on pictures of me when I was younger and it‘s hilarious. It’s funny because the person I see in those pictures is not the person I felt I was at the time. This is not about flaws, just about our own perceptions. Our ideas of ourselves and how critical or uncritical we may be.
Like I said, I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about it and when I do I am always amazed at the big disconnect.
Lately, I’ve been thinking about getting a haircut. If I wanted to make it really easy, I would just get the electric razor (hair trimmer) I have out and shave everything off. This would be shocking to some. It wouldn’t be shocking to me, just different. Invariably though it would affect the people around me because it would be something they would have to get used to.
I've been thinking seriously about doing it. I was trying to come up with a way to do it and do some good in the process.
This year, two people I know have struggled with brain cancer.
One guy found out he had a tumor on Memorial Day and died back in August. It was that fast.
Another person had suffered with a tumor for many years and underwent radiation to shrink the tumor for once and for all
[and that’s where I stopped]
Fate has a caustic sense of irony though. I had all my hair cut off. I knew I’d be out there looking for work and didn’t feel the need to handicap myself so, off it went. I took my ponytail and sent it off to an organization that takes donations of hair to make wigs for children suffering from cancer (and as a result have gone bald from the chemo). Might as well try to do something good.
That’s not ironic, what’s ironic was another friend being stricken with a brain tumor.
She is (was) another one of these forces of nature. There are a few of them I’ve run across in my days, amazingly beautiful women who have a capacity for drawing people into their orbit and getting things done (When I think about who these women are I think about Sarah, Mickey, Monica and Heidi).
You’d have to meet them to know what it is I’m talking about.
In this case, I got an email round about February from Monica. It was one of those group e-mailings to let everyone know what was happening with her (to ease the load on her staff and to keep them from repeating the story over and over and over again). It was very matter of fact and downplayed the seriousness of what lied ahead.
Paraphrasing it, it read along the lines of, “I haven’t been feeling well for awhile and we’ve discovered I have a tumor in my brain and I’ll be going in for surgery tomorrow. After surgery and some recovery (about six weeks) I should be back at work, good as new.”
Well, that was before the stroke during the operation. It was before the long road of rehabilitation and radiation.
I went up to visit Monica once and came away shaken. I pray for her and her family each day because she has a tremendous struggle ahead of her and I can hardly imagine her being laid low as she has been. Still, if anyone is capable of overcoming something of such a magnitude it’s her.
It puts the whole vanity thing in perspective though.
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