Seeing a photograph of myself is often pretty jarring. Why is it that the vision I see of myself in a photo is so different than the one I see in a mirror - not to mention the "self" that I see in my mind's eye? Pondering it can pretty easily cast me into a vortex of self-doubt, wondering how the me that people experience - my voice, my personality, my creative expression - is regarded without my knowledge.

I enjoy watching children interact with the world, the way they engage their environment without any filters, learned models, or cynicism.

I often yearn to regress into a state that's slightly more atavistic than my decades of conditioning generally allow, but it's difficult to let go of those reigns.

My hair is my everything: my best friend, my mentor, my moral compass.

It also makes me worry about photos of me that exist that I might not even know about. How do I appear in these unwitting photographs? Who is taking them, without my knowledge or consent, and from where?

If you hand an adult a lump of clay, they're likely to respond by fashioning something representative out of the raw material. For the most part, they'll simply forge an object that signifies something "real" in the world, even if that something is as abstract as an emotion or an energy. A child, on the other hand, will just as often produce something totally without semiotic meaning, a shape or a mass that represents nothing that exists outside of their imagination. Or else, they'll eat it or throw it or ignore it, wholesale.

My girlfriend says that I thrash throughout the night, for longer periods than are generally accepted as corresponding to REM sleep, and she often has to move to the couch to get any sort of rest before she goes to work in the morning.