5 begrudging self portraits

This first picture is one of my favorites. I will admit it is from high school, but it represents something that I had a lot of fun doing, and wish I was still more a part of. 

This is me after my troupe's first big belly dancing performance. I still had all my makeup and, and about half my costume. You can't see it in this picture, but where my hair is pulled back on the left, I've got a big hairclip covered in feathers that I made myself, and got a lot of compliments on. I had a LOT of makeup on, way more than I usually wear; eyeshadow, liquid eyeliner in a stripe down my cheek, lipstick, lip liner, blush. Something else you can't see in the picture is a peacock feather necklace that I got at a belly dancing convention a few months before.



This next picture I took freshman year at Pacific, for another blog project I had to do. I've since edited it, but if you would kindly look off to your right you can see it's my author picture for this website. I believe I took it with my webcam that I got for my birthday (my laptop at the time did not have once, since it was almost 7 years old by then). This is a great shot representing how much I don't like taking pictures of myself; it also has my old glasses that I really hated since senior year of high school, because they weren't a frame I liked very much and the screws fell out all the time, making the lenses fall out, and generally causing a shitload of trouble for me (because the irony is that I needed my glasses to see the tiny screw holes in order to fix them).

Actually, now that I look at it, I think that's from freshman year of high school, because those were the glasses I actually liked. I guess that just shows how much my hair hasn't changed, if I can't even tell what year my pictures are from until I take a longer look at them.

I don't know if this can really count as a self-portrait, but I really like this picture, because it's one of the few of me and my siblings together at the same time. My family all still live in California, and I don't get to see them very often (four times a year or less so far). 

Here, we're at the Japenese Tea Garden in San Francisco (we live about 20-40 minutes north of it, depending on traffic) on the tallest bridge they have, that you have to climb up, more than walk up.

The photo below is me showing off some new clothes I acquired from my fashionista aunt in San Francisco. The coat and the striped shirt were both from her, and I got the belt to try out the new style of belting shirts that are three sizes too big for you.

And this last photo is one I took recently at the Forest Grove pet store. I went in to play with the puppies because I was missing my pet guinea pigs at home in California. I guess I could say that animals are a big part of, because I've always loved them, horses in particular, but via unfortunate financial circumstances, I could never get a horse, or have many opportunities to interract with them, so I had to learn to just enjoy whatever animal contact I got. My family only ever had one dog, and we had him for less than a year, because we had to move out of our house into an apartment, and we didn't think it would be fair to keep and Australian Shepherd locked in a tiny apartment all day. 

This puppy was much more interested in something on the floor than it was with me, though. But I got to play with it for about an hour, and that hour was good enough.

Such a cute puppy!

I suppose these five pictures somewhat represent who I am, at least insofar as I take pretty crappy photos (I mean seriously, these are like, the best ever post-cute elementary kid years). There are, however, some pictures I have taken (not of me) that I think better represent my artistic side, and I would upload them here, but whenever I go hunting for them on my computer I find images from years ago that I suddenly want to edit. I guess it's because I can get easily distracted whenever it comes to something creative; there have been many times I wasn't paying attention in class because I was writing or doodling. I suppose I'm one of *those* people, the ones where their art is sometimes their downfall. My writing, for example, is such an integral part of who I am, that if I'm "in the zone," it's best not to interrupt me. I have been known to completely ignore the people I love and neglect meals if I'm in my writing groove. The worst, though, is when I'm in the writing mood and someone disrupts me: I get in a bad funk and can't continue writing again and just get very, very frustrated with whomsoever committed a the grievous act of trying to get me to stop writing so they could ask a silly question like "want some pizza?"