Image Creation
So lately, I've been wondering about image and identity creation. Not in any academic context, or with any scholarly theory behind it. Nope, I'm thinking much more shallow - I'm wondering about attraction... what I do unconsciously to be attractive, what I think is attractive, and what I've got that might be attractive to the sort of person I want to attract. In a lot of ways, I'm a simple soul, and I think the themes I've come up with as answers to the above questions reflect that. There are some things I just love that I incorporate into my image, or would like to imagine are part of that. Like I said, this is a shallow piece - it's all about me. What I find attractive in somebody else is an entirely different set of ideas. in fact, it could be interesting to play compare/contrast with that someday... but not tonight. So, on to the list of silly things that part of me is convinced is attractive.
Leather - leather in my birkenstocks or beat up old black shoes or boots, tooled leather in my new belts, half a dozen different jackets from a brown bomber picked up at the salvation army to a sleek black shell. Tan leather IPod case, guitar straps, cell phone holster, watchband... suffice it to say, people who think cows have rights to be something other than useful and tasty don't like me - but damn, I like the stuff. Versatile, soft and tough, earthy... smells good... it's genuine and traditional, and just a little bit edgy. I'm not saying I'm gonna buy leather pants anytime soon - I hear they squeak, and get too warm to be comfortable, even if I was willing to try to be that girl - but by and large it sends a message, and its one I like sending.
Guitars - grew up with 'em, worship thru 'em, live with four of 'em and it's the single best connection I've got to my Dad, who taught me about 'em since I was knee high, and a dang good one to my Mom, who cries when I sing. (I used to do the same to her, but for very different reasons.) I've got an alto voice, little rough 'round the edges that matches up well with a six-string, especially in folk or rock tones, or the tragic romantic ballads that I favor. Electric or acoustic, I love 'em both, but suspect that acoustic will always have a tighter hold on my heart - curved warm wood, the vibrations so that you can feel the sound, the half-imagined/half-remembered scent of a bonfire on a beach at night as somebody plays three chords of a song everybody knows... yeah. Though if you took my blood pressure while I was listening to a particularly sweet riff on an electric, the fire and ice that can scream and rumble out of an amplifier, my body might make a liar out of me. Lord knows, it's done so before. So it goes.
A dozen other things... driving stick, significant jewelry, hard cider in beer bottles, button-fly jeans, shooting pool, cucumber melon scent, celtic knots, pocket knives, abalone and onyx, a hint of a drawl, playing at poetry and oil pastels, sleeping in cars and living out of suitcases, overflowing bookshelves, wisecracks and wisdom, surviving, fierce independence, depth behind honesty, chivalry, more sinner than saint - pretty soon the concrete bleeds into concepts, the former illustrations, sometimes symptoms of the latter. And yes, in some ways, it's a facade, and absolutely it's incomplete - but this isn't about who I really am. It's about who I am imagining myself to be, when I daydream that somebody out there has fallen for me... it's how I want to catch her eye... it's who I want to be in her eyes.
Leather - leather in my birkenstocks or beat up old black shoes or boots, tooled leather in my new belts, half a dozen different jackets from a brown bomber picked up at the salvation army to a sleek black shell. Tan leather IPod case, guitar straps, cell phone holster, watchband... suffice it to say, people who think cows have rights to be something other than useful and tasty don't like me - but damn, I like the stuff. Versatile, soft and tough, earthy... smells good... it's genuine and traditional, and just a little bit edgy. I'm not saying I'm gonna buy leather pants anytime soon - I hear they squeak, and get too warm to be comfortable, even if I was willing to try to be that girl - but by and large it sends a message, and its one I like sending.
Guitars - grew up with 'em, worship thru 'em, live with four of 'em and it's the single best connection I've got to my Dad, who taught me about 'em since I was knee high, and a dang good one to my Mom, who cries when I sing. (I used to do the same to her, but for very different reasons.) I've got an alto voice, little rough 'round the edges that matches up well with a six-string, especially in folk or rock tones, or the tragic romantic ballads that I favor. Electric or acoustic, I love 'em both, but suspect that acoustic will always have a tighter hold on my heart - curved warm wood, the vibrations so that you can feel the sound, the half-imagined/half-remembered scent of a bonfire on a beach at night as somebody plays three chords of a song everybody knows... yeah. Though if you took my blood pressure while I was listening to a particularly sweet riff on an electric, the fire and ice that can scream and rumble out of an amplifier, my body might make a liar out of me. Lord knows, it's done so before. So it goes.
A dozen other things... driving stick, significant jewelry, hard cider in beer bottles, button-fly jeans, shooting pool, cucumber melon scent, celtic knots, pocket knives, abalone and onyx, a hint of a drawl, playing at poetry and oil pastels, sleeping in cars and living out of suitcases, overflowing bookshelves, wisecracks and wisdom, surviving, fierce independence, depth behind honesty, chivalry, more sinner than saint - pretty soon the concrete bleeds into concepts, the former illustrations, sometimes symptoms of the latter. And yes, in some ways, it's a facade, and absolutely it's incomplete - but this isn't about who I really am. It's about who I am imagining myself to be, when I daydream that somebody out there has fallen for me... it's how I want to catch her eye... it's who I want to be in her eyes.