Necessity of normalcy

My hair is never quite the same. Each day it does something a little different, presumably because, I suppose, it's one day longer. I have yet to lop any of it off since returning from over the pond in part (yes, a pun) because I keep getting told that I have nice curls, in part because I'm not ready to pay someone $20 to take them away from me, and in part because in a writers'-strike-beard kind of way, it helps keep me in that place I've been.

I have yet to take off the leather strap on my right wrist that Sophia didn't have to try hard to convince me to buy, even though I bought two at the same time. It's the one I put on and I have no immediate plans of ever taking it off.

There was talk of posting pictures here, and after a weekend in Sacramento visiting friends with my laptop, being asked to share stories and click through iPhoto, I realize I've never seen a lot of them. I remember taking pictures in general, if not always specifically, but looking through them is strangely foreign. I can see the people, places and events without trying but their photographs look like the caricatures of people sold on the Charles Bridge and outside the Uffizi Gallery. For pictures, they're ironically not very picture-perfect.

And so many of the things that are most vivid in my memory and that I most want to show people, I didn't take pictures of and so many of my favorite events of which I have scant photographic evidence would be boring to all the billions of people in the world but two or three. No one wants to see Jason at the Madrid airport triumphantly holding a plane ticket back to DC, and I don't need a picture to remember, but I know I have one. I've seen it recently and it isn't what I saw that day.

So I will happily share my photos with the world, but I have to see them first. And I'm not ready to replace my memories with photographs yet.