Now We Are Four, In Reciprocal Anti-Dog Years

Depends how you like 'em, but I think this birthday went just grand. For quite a while now, I've considered birthdays more a solitary time for reflection and planning than a social occasion. They're kind of like a second, less-noisy New Year, a chance to re-center myself and assess. And I think I like what I found, this time around. I have some idea of what it'll take to grow, and I feel a tiny bit less lost than I have most years, and that's a bigger win than it sounds, honest!

Figuring out where you are and where you're going feels like work, and specifically, it feels like a project—and what do we do with projects? We blab about them on Dreamwidth! I am having to forcibly remind myself that really, this is all just incredibly dull self-absorbed quarter-life crisis navel-gazing, and I should probably not inflict it on the people I'm fond of.

—Of course, I'll exercise that restraint when talking about feelings, but you know I'm gonna follow this post up with a bogus thousand-word-and-twenty-photo epic about adventures in bike maintenance. Well, hey: gotta have some standard of what's entertaining, even if it's obvious bullshit. Anyway, 2010 is out of its probationary period, I'm 28, and I'm-a drag my ass to bed now 'cause I've been running around like an acephalic chicken all day. Peace!

Let's Go Masquerading

There's interesting talk about userpics going on; I caught it at damned_colonial's "Icons as representation of self" post. (And she from isis: mini meta fest: userpics.)

Userpics are one of the things I've come to find most interesting about the Dreamwidth/Livejournal format over time. What a strange and wondrous convention! As near as I can tell, they were introduced as a rich feature with a poor schema, so they've been free to develop into... well, hell, all kinds of stuff. So anyway, I started trying to classify my own shit, and isis and damned_colonial's schemae didn't really seem useful for what I'd accreted, and since I'd built up my icon habits in a fairly animistic and ad-hoc way, I didn't have any sort of key ready to hand and had to actually think about it for a few minutes. Here's the best I was able to come up with:

Self-representation (literal and metaphorical)

When I use these, the person in the icon is meant to represent me. (At that particular moment in time. Prices may vary. See anima for details.) Male:female count: 4:4. Actual self count: 2. (And I'm not ultra happy with either one, but I don't have many interesting portraits sitting around. ANYWAY.)

Hexdrivers

More or less single-purpose tools, with varying usefulness. These illustrate some process, a specific (as opposed to pervasive) emotion, or some other transitory internal or external state. Or they just make a joke or cuss some.

Lamps

The most versatile and abstract tranche. More like Tarot cards than anything else, these tend to reflect some less-than-effable gestalt.



And through the whole thing, of course, there's a sort of system of references that identifies my tribe and standing, but at the moment I'm finding strategy less interesting than tactics. Anyway, what'cha all got?