Betsy Devine asks “So, what do you look like, really?“:
I remember my mom, age 80, telling me, “I look in the mirror and I think, who’s that old woman?”
I don’t know what my mom’s “real” image really looked like. I do know the person who lives behind my eyes – she’s still somewhere in between 10 and 13. She’s somebody who lives happily in her body, but expects you mostly care about her ideas and her jokes.
By one of those synchronicities, last Saturday I attended a class reunion. About one-third of my 400 classmates from the ’73 engineering class attended; it seems they’ve been meeting every five years or so, but this was the first time I was invited… apparently they’d never thought to use Google before.
Except for a dozen or so that switched to work with computers, as I did, I’d never seen any of them again after graduation. I remember being the youngest in my class, so I shouldn’t have been surprised meeting a group of, let’s face it, middle-aged or even old men. (Only a handful of the 400 were women, and I think none of them attended.) Although some select few were easily recognizable except for gray hair and some extra wrinkles, looking at the name tags was mandatory. Most of them seemed resigned to that, and a few who sported obvious hairpieces or dye jobs had to endure quite a lot of ribbing. Nearly everybody recognized me immediately, which surprised me a little… I’d always tried to attend as few classes as possible and had very few friends.
Betsy’s post woke some memories about self-image. Here’s my official graduation photo on the left (I was 22, and for some reason took my glasses off for that photo), and my current appearance on the right, 30 years later:
At the class reunion, one of my elementary school colleagues commented that I always had seemed to be in my mid-twenties, even at that time; looking at the left-hand photo, I remember thinking at the time that I looked absurdly young. I grew a beard at 30 and after that I usually thought of myself as being around that age. The right-hand photo looks OK to me… it matches my current age of 34 (hexadecimal). 😉
If you’re wondering about the title of this post, it’s from the classic text-adventure Zork. There were simple verb-noun commands to interact with the environment. “Examine xyz” was the standard command to look more closely at something:
West of House
You are standing in an open field west of a white house. with a boarded front door.
There is a small mailbox here.
>examine mailbox
The small mailbox is closed.
>examine ground
There’s nothing special about the ground.
The authors slipped in a nice joke here:
>examine self
That’s difficult unless your eyes are prehensile.
