E-mail Excerpt
This is a post to
the PinkPig List I wrote kind of about Series: The
Mask and ugliness I chose to save and webify and mildly re-edit
for readability. Love that list, it's become everything I hoped it
be and the writing from the women there is tres, tres cool.
From Astrophe [e-mail
removed] .org Sat Oct 2 17:28:18 1999
Date: Sat, 2 Oct 1999 01:58:04 -0400 (EDT)
From: Astrophe [e-mail removed]
To: The Ping Pig List [e-mail removed]
Subject: Hang in there! And Ugliness...
Truly something in the air. Maybe the seasons changing are making us
all feel pooky?! I know something in the air is making me take a
close look inward. It is just that time of year for me.
"I feel so fat and
ugly lately.....I hate it."
Strangely enough, earlier
today I was working on scanning in some of my personal photos for my
website and I chose to share a "baby
series" that came of of me feeling ugly around Halloween
last year or so? I felt truly ugly and I told myself, "Don't
hate it, BE IT. It's almost Halloween, get some ugly costumes or
make-up and recreate yourself as the ugliest creature you can
possibly be. Be UGLY dammit!"
So I was ugly. I had all
sorts of ugly masks, I ran around the living room naked and I took
all sorts of photos of me being ugly, jumping on the furniture,
grunting, yelling carrying on, picking my nose, beating my chest,
adopting unladylike positions and gestures, just damn ugly, ugly,
ugly! I am laughing now as I type, remembering because my poor
Paul....
LOL!
That poor man puts up
with more of my fancies and moments without fuss nor complaint or a
peep. He just took one look and told me to have fun and he hid
himself upstairs after I grunted at him and roared. He was either
being patient in general or at the time he was too afraid of this
ugly monster woman I was busy being to even try to tell me what to
do. LOL :~)
Good Paul, yes biscuit!
I eventually settled down
and started being a little more calm in front of my camera, thinking
about ugliness and my body and image and self-esteem and these
"faces" we put on when we are with other people -- our
families, our friends, our coworkers. Just kept clicking the
release on the camera.
When I finally got out of
the masks and stopped being the hellish personification of
"ugly" and took a shower, I realized that ugliness was a
"face" I could put on and leave on or pull off at will. It
was up to me. So then I fussed with the resulting prints and eeked
out
this baby series that now pleases me very much. I can look at it
when I feel ugly and remember that experience I created for myself
and not HAVE to dress up and carry on. I can still just
"strip" the ugliness away by looking at the photos.
I am not telling you to
run out get a mask and be a gorilla girl, I am
just saying that sometimes, maybe it is ok to be "ugly" as
all get out, so long as you make it be YOUR ugly, you be the one to
decide to be so, you splash and splatter the ugly paint on yourself,
you hold the brush, you decide when to shower. Do not just sit back
at let something/someone other than you paint you in the ugly paint.
Your body, your image,
your self-esteem, you are the one in charge, you decide when you
feel like being "ugly" and when you feel like being
"pretty" and when you just feel like plain
"being."
~Astrophe
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