February 10, 2000 -- 11:18 PM EST

Self-portrait: Blue Belly

I wish I had taken naked pictures of me way before when I was first doing all this. Front, back both sides. Like when I was a size 20 in jeans and weighed who knows what. I always guess, but then I am not a good guesser. I suppose I was too busy and too lazy. Because then I didn't have a digital camera, and I would have had to take it in B&W and then process it and then print it in the bathroom and then scan it and then go back to the entry it was for and rearrange it all and stick it in. I was simply too busy with school junk to do things on a whim for my journaling like I can now.

Why is it that photographs of nude bodies freaks people out, but if they are sketches or paintings it's somehow easier to take? Does it put it back enough so people can get a handle on it? Like...

"This is not a real body. It is an artist's interpretation of a real body even if a real body was used as a model.

Or is it that if it is a photo, it's much easier to place yourself into the photo, some kind of empathy, and that makes people uncomfortable because they have to not just empathize with the other but confront self?

What's wrong with liking to be made a good kind of uncomfortable? Sometimes comfortable is not just comfortable. It's stagnant!

I'm not upset, I am not hyper over not having those pictures. It's just that it would have been a neat comparison. I don't get strung out over how my body looks. I like how it looks fine. I live in it after all! But my old habits die hard. I have a lot of pictures of everyone, but rarely of me. I'm always the picture taker. I guess I make up for it in my journal by having tons of pictures of me.

I don't want to get older and then feel sad that I have no pictures of me in my twenties like I feel sad now that aside from grad and dances I have few "casual" pictures of me as a teenager or an older grade schooler. Why do we have TONS of baby and toddler pictures and then none after that? I look at my family album and feel like chunks of my life and development are missing!

I know I've improved a lot. I see gradual definition coming around. Mostly in my legs, but arms have hope. I know my stomach is smaller and I know my butt is smaller. Neither is anywhere close to "fit" but smaller is ok. I know not just from measures or clothes sizes. From how my body fits with Paul's.

If he cups my breasts, they are smaller. He always could cup them all, but now there's like a space. If he's spooning me when we sleep, his leg drapes different now along the swell of my hip. It's not just me, it's him too. This biking and the yard work he has to do now that we have a house have cut his biceps again. Sorta cool. Gives me a girlish thrill to see him flex his arm. I don't know why.

Flex it bay-bee! Ohhhh yeeeaaaah! LOL.

I am very body conscious lately. (That damn pregnancy thing and then from hanging out with teenage girls -- why are teenage girls so much more body-centric?! Baffling.)

So the other night after a shower I glanced in the mirror and thought -- hey, that's me! Then I thought of never having taken naked pictures from before and then I thought, what the hell? Take some fresh ones now.

So I was dancing in the hallway naked cracking Paul up while he was trying to take a photo and in the end they were all blurry and strange so I made him go away and I got the tripod and set the timer and took it myself.

Tonight I had to look at them and fuss with them some so that they weren't totally tasteless. Why would I want tasteless naked self-portraits of me for?

Wave my magic wand around and crop out distraction like the doorknob and colorize and fuss around till I got the effect I wanted -- like a monochromatic charcoal-y kind of drawing.

There. A self-portrait.

All in all, even though I am not where I want to be, I like how I look. Because that's me there. That's a real person, even if it is more drawing/painting-y than a "real photo." I am the model. I am the artist. It's my real body and it's my interpretation and yeah, blues and violets are my favorite colors.

I remember when I took drawing classes and we had to draw from nude models it felt awfully intimate to me. Not from that these people were modeling naked or that we were studying the human form. That I was standing there in front of an easel, studying this person and then creating my interpretation on paper. Following every curve. Using their bodies to give birth to this other creation. There was the intimacy for me.

I remember Brenda peeking at my drawing of our model, was his name Jim? I forget. He was sooo funny, he'd be there posing and going through his comedy routines because besides posing he had a gig at the comedy clubs and he'd try it out on us before the club audience.

Anyway, Brenda was peeking from her easel and remarked, "Geez, Cat. You don't beat around the bush do you?!"

"What?" I said, totally confused.

She just laughed and then I looked at my drawing and realized that I had sketched out the rough form and then was working on the details from the feet up and I'd just gotten done with his penis.

I took a coffee break and walked around the room and aside from the varying skill levels in drawings, people were avoiding Jim's penis or paying only token attention to it or making it smaller than it was, like they were too embarrassed to deal with it or something. Beautiful drawings of a body and then this little blankish spot there. (?!)

When I came back to my drawing I checked to see if my drawing was off kilter because everyone else's penii were so much smaller. Scale is about getting everything else relating in proportion and I checked my marks. I have a habit of relating everything to the head. Like his chest is so many of his heads wide and his legs are so many of his heads long. It's a nice unit of measure. So I looked at his penis, compared it to his head. Yeah, I wasn't crazy. His penis went from the length of his eyes to his mouth. So what the hell was Brenda talking about?! And why were all these other people not looking at his penis for their drawings?! It's only a dick!

They might have thought they were drawing Jim, but really it was a self-portrait of themselves.

I think if people are so hung up on their bodies they ought to photograph them or draw them. Really pay attention and spend some time with it, even if they can't draw well or whatever. It's a closer look at yourself than in the mirror. Then they can get over it. It's only a body. A fabulous thing, but please, only a body, not some monster thing out to get you. How can you stand to be afraid to live in your own skin? So stressful, since you can't get away from yourself.

Don't Panic!*

As for Blue Belly, I could see me hanging that up on a wall in my house if it was poster size. I can dig it.

{...}

Oh, and I just realized I actually have more than one year of archives in one place. So I can see what I was doing last year today. How about that?

{...}

Oh, and my mother called me up to tell me that my father is insane because he went out and bought a rearview mirror to stick on his bike's handlebars and then got mad because he couldn't find a flag. One of those long bike flags that wave that little orange pennant in the air and that he really is threatening to put tassels on her trike even though she doesn't want any.

Why am I laughing so hard? They are soooooo retired it is funny to me.

~Astrophe

We both love Douglas Adams and he's screaming in the background at how cool this is and dragging me to his box to see while I am trying to follow my own train of thought.

Punk.

But it was cool.

Don't Panic! Don't Panic! Don't Panic!

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