Today’s post comes after a brief —but all too long —hiatus. I’m back. New dresses, new ideas to work on! I’m excited about it.
So… some context for today’s post. Julie, my fantastic friend who acts as Fiona’s photographer, snapped me sitting hunched over on the edge of a stool. This dress was one of the last ones we did on that day. We had spent the afternoon listening to upbeat tunes and generally laughing a lot, getting a fair number of goofy, smiley pictures. (You’ll see them soon). Then, she told me to act dejected, and this picture was the result. I think I look more contemplative and caught up in my own thoughts, so that sort of was the leaping off point for this piece.
But the other thing that bears mentioning is that I was writing while on the train. Taking the train = social observation, in my opinion. Taking the train also equals snippets of other people’s conversations and random sightings of expressions out of context. There was this woman sitting a few rows away who I would see when I walked (lurched!) back to the bathroom (a fairly frequent occurence since I was trying to escape from some loud young men). She was sitting next to another woman, but I don’t think they were travelling together. I had been flicking through the photos, waiting for something to make me take notice, right before I got up to walk the length of the train to the bathroom for the first time. The woman on the train had the same slightly self-absorbed focus in her expression that I have in the shot. So, of course, I started wondering what she might be thinking. I am not sure what prompted the focus on agonizing, but I suspect that it was because, while waiting to get into the toilet on the train, I overheard four women griping (kind of SATC2 but on a train). So there was that. There was also my own experience of sitting behind seven increasingly drunk young men … let’s just say I had to tell myself more than once that “things are neither good nor bad but thinking makes them so.” It worked, for the most part.
Also, I am thinking of taking a mini-break to Chicago.
