(me, senior portrait, albeit neither the one that is in the yearbook nor the truly hideous--even if perhaps the most accurate--one that my mother chose to have as the framed 8x10 hanging up at home, where it taunts me each and every time I go back there. At some point, I suppose, one must resign that one is not actually 'unphotogenic'--somehow systematically misrepresented while everybody else, more or less, seems to look basically like their photos--but instead that one's photographed image is, however claimably defective, pretty much what one looks like, all the time, with any aesthetic value added in actual face-to-face interaction being the result of motion keeping one's interlocutors from getting a clear and steady view.)
I have just returned from my weekend on the family farm, which included my class reunion Saturday night. More on all that tomorrow, perhaps. I did not get a chance to post a dispatch from the farm because of my family's hopelessly dawdly extra-slow-dial-up connection. BTW, I spent five hours and fifteen minutes out of the five-hour drive back to Madison driving in the pouring rain, as it caused me to make one fifteen-minute wrong turn.
The first conversation I had with my mother this morning:
"You've lost weight."
"No, I haven't. Although you aren't the first one to tell me this."
"You look like you've lost twenty pounds."
"I can assure you I haven't lost twenty pounds."
"You look like you've lost twenty pounds FROM LAST NIGHT."
"What, does it look like I've lost a limb?"
"No, when you came yesterday I thought 'he's gained weight', but then now you look like you've lost weight. Shows you what a difference clothes can make."
"I wish we had made this discovery before I wore that especially-fat-seeming-ensemble to the reunion, then. Maybe I wouldn't have gotten that award for 'Classmate Who Has Most Let Things Get Out of Hand.'"
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