Surface

Someone asked me how I would describe myself and I couldn’t think of anything beyond size and weight and hair color. This morning I was hanging out with Gamma and she said, Dad, if your hair were black and your teeth were just a little sharper, you’d look like a vampire. Thanks honey, I said.

How would you describe yourself?

11 responses to “Surface

  1. i look almost exactly like i did when i was six. my hair is shorter, my teeth are straighter, but basically: my mouth takes up about half of my face. and my personality.
    or, you know. lesbian cartoon fish.

  2. I look just like Isabella Rosselini! *and* Andie McDowell! um, according to my Mom. But if you believe that I really do, you’re on crack–*and* you lost your cokebottle glasses two months ago. All anyone has to know about what I look like is that when I was seven years old, my neighborhood nickname was “Face.”

  3. j-a

    well my mum once said i look like a fresh apple.

  4. kay

    my dad says that when i’m angry, i look like a small-mouth bass.

  5. paul

    when I was in grade school a girl said I looked like Ringo Starr. I think she meant it as a complement, but I was crushed because I knew it was a code word for saying I had a big nose.

  6. kim

    I think my description would fall somewhere around yours… dark hair/eyes, pale, etc. Although people used to tell me I looked like Lisa Loeb, which while incredibly flattering, is not at all true. But I guess when you have black frame glasses, that’s the first thing you can come up with.

  7. or rather mega (c)ute

  8. I sport some sort of culturally loaded features – the blonde hair, the big blue eyes, the small waist, the penchant for dark lipstick and darker sunglasses – that garner a lot of “Hey, aren’t you… hm… You look like someone famous” type greetings. Once someone followed me for several blocks, quite certain I was Tonya Harding (I was favoring very short dresses with black tights and boots at the time. I guess all I was missing was a rink. Oh, and a bad perm. Feh.). I had to hit him in the knees with a baseball bat, but otherwise my other big descriptor would be “open”. Elderly folks love me. Linguistically dislocated people, too. It’s like I’m wearing a sign on my forehead that says “Polyglot Will Listen to All Your Stories, Then Walk You to Your Destination.”
    Also I’m a nun magnet.

  9. Nun magnet, now that’s a revealing description.

    Me, I look very Dutch in an Old Master kind of way – it’s the bags under the eyes, I think. Which is a fancy way of saying I look like your very plain middle-aged average joe to just about everyone, except women aged 50-75, who think I’m sexy.

  10. If I were of darker, Mediterranean extraction, perhaps a bit like one would imagine a real mafioso might look in NYC. Of course, I’d need to look tougher. And dress in better clothes. But I’ve got the dark circles above and under the eyes thing nailed.

    I also look better in navy blue than peach.