Posts tagged with "Julie"

Birthday Surprises

My friends know I don’t cel­e­brate my birth­day, because I don’t believe in rit­u­als1. I went through most of Thursday with­out any­one men­tion­ing any­thing, aside from Louise call­ing me from the road, remind­ing me that we were going out for lunch the next day — which the three of us do on our birth­days at work.

So when I got home around 9:30 that night — tired and hun­gry after Tai Chi — I was sur­prised to find a let­ter taped to my front door. This let­ter lead to my birth­day game:

Then, before I went to bed, I real­ized I had two phone mes­sages:

Hearing Dan and his fam­i­ly singing was awe­some, but hear­ing my dad’s voice was some­thing else. He had nev­er called to wish me hap­py birth­day him­self; it was a day only my mom would remem­ber, and she would always pass the phone to him.

It seems like every year I expect noth­ing to hap­pen, but I end up being sur­prised in one way or anoth­er.

  1. And this was before I dis­cov­ered Taoism [↩]

Differing Perceptions

Julie's drawing of me

Julie drew this pic­ture of me. The details betray her per­spi­cac­i­ty.

Such as the way my shirt tails dan­gle insou­ciant­ly from the sweater. How the pant bot­toms are slight­ly bunched up. And while I don’t wear a tie that often, the prep­py top + skater bot­toms style is accu­rate. Even the length of chain and the shape of my glass­es. All the lit­tle details I think about when I dress myself. The only thing that isn’t me is the hair, which falls flat in the win­ter, due to the fact that it’s toque wear­ing sea­son.

Also, I have no eyes, nose or mouth is this pic­ture. Only my wide-arm glass­es, which I’ve said before is a large part of my iden­ti­ty. Obviously, her exclu­sion of my facial fea­tures has put even more empha­sis on this.

I won­der: why are my arms drawn behind my back? Posture says a lot about a per­son. Maybe this was done with­out any con­sid­er­a­tion, but maybe there was sub­con­scious intent.

It’s always inter­est­ing to find out how oth­er peo­ple see you. A self-image is often biased.

So which image is more accu­rate; yours or theirs?