i’ve been looking so long at these pictures of me

(apologies to the cure.)
a couple of notes about having pictures taken.
first, there is the good result. at chris and mary’s new year’s party, amanda wanted to get a picture of my 8-bit tie. here it is: TeRRY with an 8-bit tie (the tie comes from thinkgeek)
college-slacker-crop.jpg
next up we have the bad result. this comes to us from a completely different amanda than the one who recently took the 8-bit pic. back when i was in college, one time while i was at home i decided to cut my hair. at some point afterward, i decided it was new and cool enough that i should take some pictures of myself and send them to various friends. the pictures were taken, developed, picked, and mailed. (as in traditional u.s. post office mail…i used to write real letters on paper back in those days!)
years go by. then a couple of days ago i get an email from amanda (who’d recently caught up with me online and now reads my blog sometimes) with the subject of “who in the heck is this guy?????” there’s an attachment. it’s a scan of a pic. a pic from years ago. a pic of me.
(as a random aside, tamara used to love the pics taken from that day. she thought i was utterly yummy, and asked me if i thought it were inappropriate if she fantasized about the me from those photos since it was still technically me.)
the only thing i can say in my defense is that i’m very, very happy the scanned image in that email was from those sets of pics and not from some i’d taken maybe a couple of years before that. although this reminds me that those may be floating around out there somewhere in the world — and that, my friends, is a very scary thought.

4 comments on “i’ve been looking so long at these pictures of me”

  1. dude, well. I am geek enough to think that the 8-bit tie is freaking hilarious. On a side note, in Taiwanese (that is, the dialect of Chinese called “min-nan”, the language “of the people” as J.J. from Good Times would have put it), they have a lot of “japanese” loan words. I put that in quotes, because the words are actually of English origin. And the word for “tie” in Taiwanese is pronounced something like “neh-ku die” (as in “neck tie”). So, English->Japanese->Taiwanese.
    tu-ra-ku = truck, nai-da=lighter (as in the zippo sort), she-at-tsu=shirt, auw-do-bye= auto-bike= motorcycle. Lotta fun, languages. So, are you going to make a trip over here anytime soon or what?

  2. So the pic in your blog is a bad result? I don’t really see that, myself. I mean it’s a lot different look than you have now, but it was the early ’90s, and at least it’s a lot more interesting than any “look” I’ve managed to create over the years. As far as pictures a few years before that, could you be referring to when I shaved the side of your head? Or are you referring to further back?

  3. serena: thanks. on both counts. 🙂
    ash: “geek enough”? you’re a lot geek. you’re into languages, you coded a lot (even if you hated computers in college…look at you now), you got an engineering degree…i think that’s enough. as far as a trip — i really should…i just keep putting it off. i’ve never been much of a traveler.
    ack: the bad i was referring to was more that it showed my face, but also that my haircut wasn’t so awesome. the rest of it i’m not too put off by. i wasn’t referring to the shaved sides of my head — even though it doesn’t look too good in pics i’ve seen of me, i liked it. (wait ’til you see the new one amanda sent me.) the ones i was referring to were further back…probably ’89 or so. they hopefully won’t surface (even though i have a stash in my personal possession). part of trying new looks is sometimes choosing poorly. i’ve got my share of failed looks, even though i usually thought i was choosing pretty carefully.

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