Yesterday, my beloved long-time friend Barbara headed over to our place for our first in-person meeting since the pandemic. After she parked her car and saw me waiting for her outside, the realities of the coronavirus momentarily went right out of her head and she instinctively hugged me — I turned my head away during the hug. Then, we headed out for a walk and a delicious lunch outside, wearing masks on our heads.
Our conversational topics were headed up by:
the current head of the United States,
systemic racism,
other things that are worrying our heads (like voting and bureaucracies),
photography, and
how Barbara helps her partner, Jim, get his head out of the sand and how Jim helps Barbara get out of her head.
I have it in my head, here and now, that there will be many heads in my recently captured images.
I usually have it in my head that the Daily Bitch calendar will somehow relate to my daily blog post and sure enough, the name of this adorable neighborhood dog with the amazing head …
When I was driving into work yesterday, the traffic was awful. It was okay, though, because I knew my first patient had cancelled. I don’t know what I looked like, behind the steering wheel of my car, but I assume I didn’t look scared about being late.
As I dealt with what looked like the last of a long series of multiple detours and cars battling it out for survival of the fastest, the Talking Heads tune “Life During Wartime” came on the radio.
I don’t know what Talking Heads looked like while they were singing the studio version of that song, but here’s a live performance version* of that song:
Yesterday, when I heard the line “I’ve changed my hairstyle so many times, I don’t know what I look like,” I wondered … could that be my next blog post title?
I haven’t changed my hairstyle that much lately (although I’ve been considering it), so only the second part of that line made the title, today.
Why did I choose that title — instead of another one that looked different — today?
Because I don’t know what I look like (and I hope I am not the only one who feels that way).
I think it’s difficult to tell what we look like. We are on the inside looking out, as everybody else is on the outside looking at those parts of us we can’t ever really see.
While we can’t know what the louse in Robert Burns’s poem looked like, I will tell you that I’ve been quoting Mr. Burns elsewhere (sometimes, it looks like, erroneously):
Och. I’m glad Robbie Burns — the Bard of Scotland — cannot see how I mangled part of his famous poem “To a Mouse.”
I don’t know what it looks like I’m doing in this post, but I better get back to the topic, fast.
So … can we see ourselves as others see us? Do we want to?
As I had many thoughts about perception, yesterday morning, I wondered what people were seeing as I passed by them.
I suppose I could ask the wonderful people in those last two photographs (Julia, Alex, Kevin, Erin, and others at the Starbucks I frequent at work) what they saw. Yes, I could use the antidote of Reality Testing, a very effective cure for the cognitive distortion of Mind Reading.
I wonder what Julia, Alex, Kevin, Erin, or the baristas whose names I do not know would say, if I DID ask them? I’ll let you know, if I get up the courage to ask the question.
Finally, as a fan and a student of stand-up comedy, I shall allow the late Joan Rivers to have some last words:
“I wish I had a twin, so I could know what I’d look like without plastic surgery.”
Thanks to Talking Heads, to Joan Rivers, to all the talking and non-talking heads I looked at yesterday, and to you — of course! — for looking at this, today.
* I don’t know if you want to look at a third version of “Life During Wartime,” but here’s the Stop Making Senseperformance I looked at, with wonder, during the 1980’s:
