Visage

Slowly but surely, as their comfort level with "being out here" has increased, more and more of us have revealed ourselves with a photograph, allowing the world to know us by our faces. Surprisingly, many of these photos have not been the carefully crafted, airbrushed, or photoshopped-to-death portraits so many people put out here to show their best side. I find that rather refreshing.

Bloggers, at least in my mind, are a lot like radio Disc Jockeys, who you try to picture in your mind, creating a face out of that voice, only to discover when you finally meet them or see them on TV that they look nothing like you imagined. However, there have been some remarkable exceptions in that many of my blogging breathren have looked exactly like I imagined them, and perhaps that is because it is their words that crafted their personas rather than their voices. The moment Buffalo leaked a picture of himself on his blog, it was "Yep, that's what a Buffalo looks like!".

Many of our bloggers of the fairer sex have included pics of their husbands, and I am not the least bit surprised to notice that no matter how hot the sister, the hubby is rarely a Mel Gibson, but is more often of the "everyman" variety. I have yet to encounter a buck-ugly guy in our group, except for maybe Tim when he gets a little bit crazy with the photoshop. I exclude myself from these assessments as the only jury I have been so far subject to, I'm married to, so she's biased. But, no, she wouldn't rate me a Mel Gibson material either.

I, personally, have this love-hate relationship with the camera. When I look in the mirror, I really have no quarrel with my visage. The camera, however, seems to have this evil purpose in mind whenever it records my face, for whenever I look at the results, it's like "Who in the hell is THAT?" It doesn't mesh with my mental view of myself. Perhaps the mind does it's own form of photoshopping whenever you study yourself in the mirror, making you see only what you WANT to see, except when you focus in on that zit or that nose hair escaping from a nostril. Perhaps I have this inability to freeze on my face that carefully crafted expression I paint on my mug in the mirror whenever a camera is involved. Who knows, all I know is that I have one hell of a hard time coming up with a picture that I'm willing to share with the world, being so critical of my own visage. Thank Bob my wife doesn't share this affliction.

Then there's podcasting........and that's a whole new can of worms altogether........