Friday 27 May 2011

RIP Jeff Conaway

OK, I try to avoid schmaltz (though somehow it always catches me up) but... p-r-e-t-t-y dang sad about Jeff Conaway passing away.

During a very earnest all-consuming Grease phase obsession in the 1990s I cultivated the mother of all crushes on this guy for the best part of three or four years (hey, that's a long-term crush when you're a teenager with escapism tendencies!). Hey, I even watched Elvira, Mistress of the Dark for him. And an episode of Babylon 5. And Ghostwriter.

And Celebrity Rehab. Which was exploitative, futile and sad. The man was in a lot of pain. Nuff said.

Best to say, RIP Kenickie...

via here

Sunday 22 May 2011

A Sea... of Me*

'K, so, just over a year ago I wrote a somewhat defiant blog post entitled "When I have a brand-new hairdo..." in which I tried to give a little boost to those of us who don't fit the category of classic beauty... whatever that is.

And... it's safe to say that despite that defiance I've spent a good part of the last year blaming certain failings in my life on the fact "I'm not pretty enough". Never mind that "not being pretty enough" (for what, exactly?) didn't hold me back from a much-wanted promotion, but in certain situations (such as being "ignored" when emailing folk to organise social events, seeming to be demoted as a friend, or receiving no valuable interest on a dating site) my default complaint is always "I'm not pretty enough". Which... yuh, I know, it's crazy-talk, but once the negative voice chimes in there's no stopping it.

(...Let's not gloss over the fact that this congenital negativity, folks' general busy-ness, or a mistake I made in that friendship shortly after Christmas, might be factors!)

...But I turned a corner lately. And this lass (in a well-timed episode of Glee) helped no end.

Glee's Rachel, Born This Way screenshot via here
Only very recently have I reconciled myself with my own schnoz and my Heidi-the-psychic-possum boss-eyed look. A friend used to tell me until I was blue in the face that if I changed my nose then my face wouldn't be my own and it wouldn't look 'right'... but it took this ever so slightly kitsch episode of Glee to make me feel completely at ease with what I'd been given.

As I ruthlessly quoted, from High Art, on 5th February this year, "...the ugliest quality in a woman is vanity", I have to admit that like many women in the western world in possession of functioning eyes I'm quite very critical of, say, how I look in photos, so... yeah, vain to some degree... I saw a picture of myself taking shots at a work event lately and cringed; it was NOT flattering; too many chins, a heinous "snapper sneer"... not purty in any sense of the word!

...So I decided to go Cindy Sherman and play about with some self-portraits. Maybe it's vain, but when I've taken shots of friends of mine in the recent past, they've been equally self-critical of how they were portrayed so, armed with a new hairdo, a tripod and a shutter-release remote, I decided to be my own photographer. And these are some of the results:


On a slight -- but only minuscule tangent -- I've crafted a spring/summer look I want to rock, just as soon as I can acquire the trilby, and the eBay satchel rocks up (it's been shipped, woot!).


PS This post title* comes from something my friends and I used to say to each other if we were about to talk relentlessly about ourselves in an email... but if you can't swim in a Sea of Me on your own blog then where can you, eh?

qb x