Bend

This is such a weird picture that, by the time it got to this point, I felt I had to post it and tell its story. I'm not sure I'm going to link it to Theme Thursday though. I don't think I have the intestinal fortitude ( there's just something about that phrase that cracks me up.) No guts no glory. No problem.

Also, as I'm sure fellow members of the Central Maryland Photography Guild are looking at this in horror, I want to publicly promise not to submit anything like this to the possible gallery show.

But, the theme for yesterday's theme Thursday was "Bend", and I had been revisiting the whole issue of having thought I was from another planet when I was about 8 years old....

The photo is of my own left hand. The last finger of both of my hands is noticeably curved inwards, and my fingers, though quite long, are very mildly curved. Even to this day, I have never seen another person with hands like mine.

Often people ask me if I have arthritis, which I don't or, if I do, it isn't diagnosed. ( My hands do ache. Everything aches. But this is not a Whining and Complaining Entry) Angela, God rest her soul, once went to a great deal of trouble to find out what the name of the problem was. She wrote it down for me. Ithy - something. Like a fish.

By that time I was over the whole worry that I might be from Jupiter, but was still wondering what it was. It's nothing. It's just some abnormality with some latin name, and really, I'm lucky I wasn't born with a tail or something. Or who knows, maybe I was born with a tail and it fell off. Maybe Mom just didn't tell me for all these years on account of she didn't want to make me feel bad. But no. Mom saves everything. If I DID have a tail she'd have saved it and I'd have found it in the cedar chest.

Anyway, it was my long curving fingers and the deep lines etched into my palms that gave me all the proof of alien origin I needed as an eight year old. Eight year olds don't have fully developed logic skills. And still, my pinky fingers are what I thought of when I saw the theme

But, it was just a picture of my hand. To other people my hands often look dramatic, and The Hub claims to find them beautiful. ( Oddly, I think he might, and him saying so isn't just part of his "yes dear" rhetoric). To me, it didn't look like much of a photo, so I thought I'd try to jazz it up in photo shop. Now, I'm someone who only lately learned the difference between an f-stop and a door stop. Photo shop is always a huge experiment for me. So, as you can see, I started fooling around with the color and black and white until it was fairly boloxed up. Then, I figured out how to correct it ....to make the boundries of the black and white parts and the color parts go where you'd more or less expect them to go....and I found out I didn't want to.

This may have been my ( as far as I'm concerned, mythical) "inner child" popping up, saying "I don't WANNA color in the lines." But, whatever, the image, as it was, became meaningful to me. I don't expect it to be meaningful to anybody else. However this is what was on my mind about it.

For one thing, because my balance has been so poor, this angle of my hand is a common thing for me to see...because I have reached out to steady myself on a wall, or because I'm thinking I might tip over and have my hand loosely outstretched in front of me in case I have to catch myself. Additionally, my eyesight isn't steller either, so, lacking contact lenses I sort of feel my way along walls in my house. In short, I do, go through life with my left hand held up in a defensive posture, against falls, low hanging house plants and suddenly-leaping-down-VioKitties....and metaphorically, against all the strange, shocking, horrifying stuff that goes on in the world.

Of course, nothing ever really looks this way to me. I'm not living some badly colorized movie, not even inside my own head. But, sometimes I feel like I am moving back and forth between two worlds...between the secular and the spiritual, between what I think and what I feel, between my perecption and the perceptions of others. I feel like I am struggling along, and that being in between two ways of looking at something I have to hold my hand out in front of me to find my way.

So, that's the story of this weird picture and what it means to me. Happy Friday!