video killed the bdd star

sunday night, i shot an instructional video for a dance team with whom i've been working for several years. last night, i sat at the kitchen table and watched it, writing down what bouts of aphasia and tourette's syndrome casey should edit out. we taped the intro -- a shoulders-up shot -- at the end of the tape. casey let the tape roll as i sampled words to use, letting them roll around in my mouth before spitting them out with an eye-roll, an obscenity, and a twitch before finally settling on a sturdy script.

in my face's more serene depictions, i thought, "whoa -- that's totally my mom at my age." i see our resemblance more clearly than ever on that video. i also never got the courteney cox connection until then either. alas, our resemblance only exists in the follicular and mandibular region and not the corporal or financial. the freakiest is watching and thinking, "wow -- i really am n years old! how'd that happen?!"

have you ever watched yourself on video for a while? it gets mesmerizing, not in a narcissistic way, but because the person you feel you obviously know better than anyone else in the world becomes, in some respects, a stranger.

to see your own face in action in profile is new. watching the way your face works, the gesticulations with your hands is like meeting someone entirely new. you see parts of your body you never noticed and think, "hm. i never knew i looked like that." to see yourself as others do feels like finding something hidden in the back of the basement or tucked away in a deep drawer that you never knew was there. you don't really know what to do with it. you just wondered why you never noticed it under all that dust and cat litter in the crawlspace of your ego.