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and in other news... The Possibilities Are Endless Happy Thoughts How does Oprah decide? Rad Rhymes with Dad I'm 5'1" Snowdog Four Eyes Are Better Than Two Sold Out Glasses You're So Vain other stuff: buy stuff i designed my flickr page forgotten new york frellyheck chinh loobylu jakwon tof reknin 63 days heart and mind obscure store dooce oddy-knocky natruallycurly.com knitty TRIPPYswell RSS Feed www.flickr.com
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It's My Times
Saturday, February 18, 2006  Tomorrow I will be in the New York Times Sunday Style section, in an article about people who take pictures of themselves. Yes. A whole entire article devoted to narcissists who snap their own shots and post them on the internet. Yep. That's me. Right there, in the upper right hand corner. For some reason, they post the Sunday articles on Saturday night, so you can check it out now.I took that picture on a day when my hair looked particularly good, albeit very red due to a color removal process I had been performing over several days in order to get my hair back to somewhat of it's normal hue. I was photo-documenting the process and, since I need to share every aspect of my hair with everyone on the internet, I posted the picture to my Curly Girly set on Flickr. Someone recently asked me why I put so much of myself on the internet. Well, actually, he asked about the pictures, but pictures and personal information are so closely related to me and my reasoning behind sharing them is the same, so I will try to answer the mystery of both. I started putting myself on the internet in 1996. That's when I created Spacegirl, my semi-defunct personal site. You can read the saga of Spacegirl here, I really don't feel retyping it all. Anyway, back then, creating content for web sites was a brand spanking new art form, and sharing your life with other people through the miracle of the internet was fresh and exciting. I was two years out of college, I had a dial-up account and an abundance of time and energy. I was also a struggling illustrator, trying to get freelance gigs, while working at my day job at a web design company. At the time, there was a collective push to create content and to find ways to make money off of it. Spacegirl was discovered by the girls over at ChickClick, the first cyberchick web portal, and I was asked to join as one of their charter members. All of a sudden, ads were being served on my site. If I wanted to make any money, I had to create more content. I've kept a journal since I was sixteen, so writing about my life in minute detail is a very familiar and comfortable thing for me. I'd write little essays about whatever came to mind and I'd post them to Spacegirl and people would read them. And then a funny thing happened: people started emailing me. They'd thank me for talking about things that affected them too, like insomnia or depression or how hard it is to make friends once you're out of college. Somehow, my regular experiences and mundane thoughts resonated with people. Then I went a step further and started transcribing my first journal from 1987. I would post the entries along with witty commentary by my now-much-more-mature self. I wrote about sex, drugs, being obsessed with a guy who doesn't even know you breathe the same air he does, dealing with ex-boyfriends who get drunk and tell you they still love you, how hard it was to be a goth in 1987 on Long Island, etc. Lots of juicy stuff. The Teen Angst Journal became a very popular part of my site. I got more feedback from my readers, who, as I got older, seemed to get younger. I had morphed into the sage older sister who survived it all and somehow emerged on the other side, sanity intact. There is something very special about touching a young person's life like that. Especially the kind of depressed, black-clad kids who read my site. If I could help put the horrors of the teen years into any sort of perspective, and maybe inject a little humor in there while I was at it, exposing myself in such a way was worth it. At the same time, I was building my freelance career, so I created my portfolio site, angelamartini.com. It's kind of hard to be secretive about things when you've got a url that's your name. Then along came blogger, which took writing about oneself to a whole new level. Blogger made things easier and harder at the same time. ChickClick went under, I no longer got ad revenue and I eventually stopped updating Spacegirl, but by that time it didn't really matter. I'd been carried along on this wave of content creation until I had years worth of personal information on the internet. I honestly don't think I would have kept it up for so long if it hadn't have been for the money and my readers. I just happened to be around at the start of something new and interesting and I saw it through to where I am now, posting stuff here on TRIPPYswell and Flickr. Now, why would I post all those pictures of myself on Flickr? What is the reasoning behind that? Well, there are several reasons, because the pictures serve different purposes. I have one rather large set consisting mostly of scanned pictures from college. This is my vanity set. I went to art school and had friends who were artistic like me. We all liked taking pictures. Sometimes I would pose for them, sometimes they'd pose for me. It was something to do–a reason to put on a black velvet dress and some rather dramatic makeup. To play with colored lights. To be artsy fartsy! So I have a lot of these pictures of myself, all dolled-up and looking rather cute and young. And yes, some of them I took of myself. I get happy when I look at them. They make me laugh. They remind me of the old days, not that those days were so great, but whatever. They remind me of the people I knew and experiences we had together. So I scanned them in and took out all the lint and scratches and posted them. It's me, time-travel style. I don't even look like that any more, but it's fun to hear what other people have to say about the younger me. It is a vanity set, after all. Now that I'm quickly approaching thirty-four, I need all the ego-boosting I can get. I have another set of pictures devoted to my hair. My hair is serious business, to me at least. I frequent the boards at NaturallyCurly.com and one of the things a lot of us do is document our hair. I know, it sounds boring, but if you don't have curly hair, you just will not understand. Having curly hair is often very traumatic. Most stylists aren't taught how to cut curly hair, so many curly people suffer through years of bad haircuts, snickered taunts from mean school children, and the stigma of having wild, out of control locks in a world dominated by sleek haired Hollywood starlets. At the NaturallyCurly boards we can commiserate about the difficulties that are inherent in having this type of hair. We also talk about styling techniques and rate the myriad of products available. It's a support group for women (and men) who have only one thing in common: curly hair. I think of my hair set is a science experiment as well as an obsession. If you look closely at some of the pictures, you will see it's definitely not about vanity. I look pretty haggard and unattractive in some of them. No lipstick! Glasses askew! Hair frizzy! Ack! But it's not about looking good or even looking semi-okay, it's all about the hair. You will notice that the descriptions usually have product combos in them or info about who cut my hair or what I had used to dye it. I don't expect you to understand, but there it is. It's a curl thing. I also have a set of pictures where I'm wearing glasses, just for people who are interested in that sort of thing. You know who you are. Last, but not least, are photos of me as a kid. These are pure fun. I love old pictures, and since I am the keeper my family's snapshots, I post them freely. People get a kick out of them. Especially the one with our giant paperclip wallpaper. So, since my privacy tolerance level was pretty low to begin with, what with all that Spacegirl stuff, posting pictures of myself on a site as innocuous as Flickr isn't that big a deal. I mean, sheesh, I once had the story of how I lost my virginity on the internet, why not some old snapshots? The thing I really like about Flickr is the community atmosphere. As someone who works at home without the social contact of a regular job, I like to connect with people any way I can. There is an immediacy to photographs that you can't get by just posting words to a bulletin board. You look at a picture and see through someone else's eyes. Then you can leave a comment like "Awesome Pic!" and they will read that and it will probably make them feel good. I know it makes me feel good when people do it to me. So I think that pretty much covers it. I guess you can condense it all into one of two statements: I'm an internet exhibitionist. Or I just have too much free time on my hands. It's either or. Anyway, just go buy the paper tomorrow. posted at 11:46 PM . link to this post .   .
(5) comments
5 Comments:
This was a great post.
By It's hard to believe that I started reading Spacegirl back in early 1998. It was my inspiration to get my first URL and start my own true "blog," (before blog was even a word, eh?) -- thetangiblevoice, which is now gone. I had had a website for a few years prior, but that was my first URL and actual daily updating. Now it's Flickr, I can only wonder what is next.
By
David, how did we get so old? Where oh where did the time go?
By
Steve,
By
Ha ha! Now look what I've gotten myself into!
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