Prompt 2: A Photo of Yourself and a Description of How Your Day Was

First, a photo of me, taken on this very day

What is noticeably lacking here is the really stellar sunburn
I've since developed.  Photo is courtesy of Kara

And now a description of my day: 

It was sort of up and down.

I began by waking up at 7:30 am which was vulgar and unacceptable.  So I dozed more and less deeply till 9:00 when I woke up properly and commenced worrying about arriving at Thanksgiving Point on time to meet Kara at 11.  This proved to be both completely unnecessary and also very on point when Kara texted to tell me she was running late and we should bump our rendezvous back to noon...and yet, despite having been ready to go in time to make the original appointment, I still managed to arrive 20 minutes late.  

The plan was to catch the last day of the Thanksgiving Point annual tulip festival.  Tulips are Kara's favorite flower, so she tries to go every year.  I had never been, but it sounded lovely so I decided to make the pilgrimage.  Unfortunately, it seems that every other human along the Wasatch front had the same thought.  The place was crawling with humanity.  

Since I had previously informed Kara of my need of a picture of myself to post today, we were planning on taking one amongst the tulips.  The hordes of humans, however, proved an endless source of annoyance to Kara's photographic sensibilities.  Nevertheless, we perservered and took several pictures.  I also learned that over the last several months I have completely lost the ability to smile on command.  When I try I start thinking about each muscle that I'm using to form the expression and suddenly it feels like a completely unnatural shape for my face to be in and I can feel my expression sliding from smile to terrifying grimace.  Apparently my natural response to this experience is to assume what Kara not at all affectionately refers to as "The Face."  The Face, so I'm told, appears to express my extreme confidence in the stupidity of the person at which I am looking.  Unfortunately, it seems The Face comes of its own accord and without my conscious knowledge or effort.  It appears to be the product of me striving for a non-grimace-like expression.  I'm not sure what that says about me, but I know it must be something...

There was one good thing, however, which came out of my loss of facial abilities.  At one point a woman, overhearing Kara yelling at me to smile like a normal person, stood behind her and started making ridiculous faces at me to make me laugh.  Even more awesome, this then inspired a completely separate random Indian couple to also start making faces and giving me jazz hands.  This is possibly the most fantastic thing any stranger has ever done for me.

Hordes, grimaces, and some really unseasonable heat aside, the tulips were quite lovely.  Nothing makes me quite so happy as flowers.  I found myself missing Kew Gardens quite a lot as we ambled.  

After the tulips my day took a turn for the incredibly boring and mundane.  Much of it was spent resisting the urge to take a nap.  I wrote my blog post for yesterday, finally started reading Way of Kings (Mike lent it to me about 50 years ago), and chatted with Kara and Matt.

It was when Kara sent me a few of the pictures for this post that things took a dip.  When I look at myself in the mirror I don't think I look skinny, but I also don't think I look gigantic either.  But the first thing I thought when I saw these pictures was how I just looked like a morbidly obese blob.  Was that really what I looked like all day?  I thought I looked ok...

It was on that depressing note that I took off to satisfy my week-long craving for fish and chips.  And while I normally have no problem going out to eat alone, having set out already primed for melancholy, it hit me hard throughout dinner.  I had chosen to bring along a really abysmal book called Love Walked In (when the waitress asked why I was reading a bad book I explained that I hadn't wanted to get anything on any of my good books) which spends the first 30% of its pages describing a completely ridiculous romance.  Ridiculous though it was, even with such painful prose, I still got all pathetic and wistful.  The Lonlies plus the Loathings are a dark combination...

And that brings us to right now.  

You'll be glad to know that I am forcing myself to look at those pictures with a positive outlook.  I am trying to put my ideals into practice, as it were, in terms of self-love.  It's a struggle, but as you can see, I posted one of them, as instructed, at the beginning of this post.  I feel like that is a step in the right direction.  Against all expectations, my mood is looking slightly up (I feel like there's a Sunday School lesson in there for anyone who wishes to tease it out into full development) and I plan on watching a movie before I go to bed.  

Coming up tomorrow we have prompt 3: My Idea of the Perfect Date.  That should be interesting, so stay tuned!