Over The Top

I just caught myself looking over the top of my glasses at someone. Not as a theatrical gesture, but just doing it.

Of course, the first thing I did when I got my new glasses was to immediately spend an undisclosed amount of time staring in the mirror and trying out various poses: right profile with glasses, left profile with glasses, come-hither head-tilt with glasses, big grin with glasses, serious don't-mess-with-me-face with glasses, and so on. You know what I'm talking about. Everyone does this. The purpose of this activity, as you of course know, was to determine ahead of time what never to do while wearing glasses. Looking over the top of them was one of the unanimous NOs.

 Lest you think me vain, it's not because of the forehead rendered large and glistening and the chin doubled by this particular head-tilt. It's the whole... attitude of it that I object to seeing on my face. It seems a way to perch yourself atop your pedestal via your eyeballs and look down from your lofty height at something or someone. It's more than merely: "I'm looking down my nose at you", it's "I'm so high up here I have to look over the top of these frames and then down my nose." These are not impressions I wish to broadcast with my mild myopia.

Alas, I found myself today sitting in an undisclosed location zoning out and sightlessly staring at the action around me over the top of my glasses. The particular population who frequents this undisclosed location are a demographic that is signified, in part, by its seemingly contradictory propensity for gazing down noses and a hyper-sensitivity to being gazed at from atop a schnoz.

Imagine my predicament. I sit here in this veritable powder keg of scrutiny, not just looking but staring down my nose over the top of my glasses. Adding insult to injury, I was thinking. Which, when combined with not paying attention to my external surroundings, produces a sort of slack-jawed frowny face. In my defense, I was thinking about cheese enchiladas which obviously requires a great deal of concentration.

Having reached the end of my enchilada ruminations, I returned to my senses enough to realize that my glasses had slipped down my nose in my reverie and my gaze was affixed on a group of people directly in front of me. I realized what I must have looked like and immediately went into panic mode. Did they see me? Should I apologize and explain about the enchiladas? Should I just play it cool and turn around? These are the politics of frequenting such places - taxing, to say the least. But while I was settling my glasses into their proper position and settling upon a course of action, I realized the objects of my inadvertent gaze were completely consumed in an activity of their own: telling each other what I know to be outright lies.

It appears that not many people notice nor care what I'm doing with my eyeballs, glasses or enchilada thoughts. They have their own lies to tell. Discuss.

The Gift of Truth

"'Beauty is truth, truth beauty', - that is all

Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know."

Thank ye, John Keats. A beautiful sentiment and often repeated completely out of context. (Don't even get me started.) And, it's all well and good for a piece of ancient pottery, but really? Is that really all ye need to know? I don't know. Maybe it is. I'm mulling around this maligned poetic fragment today for a few different reasons. (Not the least of which is because I have to keep the gray matter sharp. Ouch. A sharp brain seems like it would be a painful thing, indeed. Maybe I just need to keep it firm, yet gelatinous enough to keep some of those mysterious folds and electric information highways open and firing in the correct directions. Radioactive jello, if you will. And speaking of electric information highways, who on earth embeds some sort of spammy iPad giveaway in a scholarly website of poetic deconstruction?! Digression complete.)

So, truth. It's been a hot topic the last couple of weeks (or millennia) owing to a writing prompt and a couple of friendly blogger awards. I'm not quite cool enough to know exactly what GBE2 even means, much less participate. But I have been cool enough to have received a few of these awards. Namely, The Versatile Blogger Award and the Tell Me More About Yourself Award. I want to say, as I have said before, that I am really and truly honored that each and every person who reads this blog even reads my nonsense. Your enjoyment is the ganache on the torte. And the Belgian chocolate curls are the little bits of love that get sent my way.

 The gist of the awards is to share 7 (not 6, not 12) things about yourself. That's where the truth comes in and it all gets slippery. Perhaps I'm over thinking the whole thing. (Moi? Never.) It's a little bit hard for me to disclose (I typed "disclothesed" by mistake and that's funny. Freudian finger slips.) these "truths" about myself because I think in the very act of it we edit it around to the things we think will be the funniest or the most interesting or make us seem award-winning enough. That's not to say we're all a bunch of dishonest liar-liars. It's just one of those human nature kind of things. We, all of us, have our pants on fire a little bit. It's the nature of personal perspective. I also think that the truths that we discover about people, we discover indirectly. Out of the corners of our eyes, if you will. They are the things that shine through the stories we tell, our reactions to situations, our interactions with our worlds. Sometimes the things we most fervently believe to be true about ourselves are more a product of defense mechanisms or our expectations of ourselves. Over thinking? Yes. But if you've hung around the Periphery any time at all, you know that's what we're all about here.

I believe there are absolute truths to be known. By definition, truth must be one thing and not another. I'm just not entirely sure that I can tell the truth about myself. I can, however, make up some fantastic lies. Being versatile, and all.

1. I have a goiter the size of a pomelo under my chin. Rather than have it fixed, I'd rather paint a face on it every day to reflect my mood.

2. The entities that I refer to as "the Hooligan" and "my jBird" are actually my extensive golf ball collection and a Grecian urn of my dead cat's ashes, respectively.

3. I make and wear pillbox hats out of old tuna cans. Sometimes I rinse them out first.

4. I only eat foods that begin with the letter M.

5. I am actually a retired rugby player (New Zealand All Blacks) who is writing this blog as a therapy exercise in "getting in touch with my feminine side".

6. When I was 6, I fell into an open manhole cover and was raised for 4 years by CHUDs until I was spotted on a reconnaissance mission to the grocery store for Mallomars. That's when the goats took over my upbringing.

7. I was once in a car full of underaged, drunk, naked people who got pulled over for failing to signal a turn. We were let go with only a warning. It helps to have those CHUD connections.

Now, anyone who has made it to the end of this nonsense intact gets an award.

Also, in all sincerity, go check out The M Half of the M-n-J Show. She's smart, she's got a rapier wit, she does weekly grammar lessons, she writes fiction, she obviously has eclectic taste in blogs because she gave me this award along with some other blogs that are good, and she lives in one of the coolest cities in the country. She's one of those people who is great to have around to keep you on your toes and keep you laughing. Who doesn't want someone like that around?  She also has a thing for parrots and pirates.