I had a weird day Saturday, in spite of having very little planned, which usually makes me happy. Perhaps it was due to the fairly gloomy weather, which stayed gray most of the day, but I also had a disappointing week at work in  a handful of ways, and I’d been dissatisfied with my job most of the week, so maybe on Saturday it finally caught up to me. For whatever reason, after hitting the grocery store I was in a real funk, so I decided around 4:30 to throw on a wig and take some photos.

The problem was that I’d decided I wanted to shoot outside, because there’s one particular point in our garden where I can aim the camera and actually appear to be surrounded by foliage, rather than surrounded by wooden fence which is how most shots taken in my backyard look. By early evening, the sun had finally emerged from behind the clouds and the end of the day looked fairly pleasant, too. But my bright idea was to dress up in this velvet Renaissance dress I had and put on this long Godiva wig with it, and it was just too much and too hot for me to manage outside. Plus, by the time I got into costume the light had shifted from when I did my test shots, and that one little patch of backyard I wanted to use was getting blasted with the setting sunlight, so those photos were an absolute mess.

Test shot before costume change, when the light was still right. Sweat pants, tank top, hair in a mini claw clip – this is my usual attire when not being forced to dress properly.

I was pretty frustrated after my outside costume photo attempt went awry, plus I’d gotten overheated and smudged up my makeup, so I was about to chalk the whole thing up to another failed attempt at the end of a week of what felt like a string of failed attempts at whatever, but in the end I decided to hell with it, threw on a red curly wig and some jeans, and decided I could at least get a few shots of the makeup I made an effort to apply before shooting.

I think this looks nothing like me, which always makes me happy. I have loads of pictures of me looking like me, so it’s nice to see something different every once in awhile.

Then I of course had to start flinging the wig around a bit:

Probably a forced smile, but hey, whatever works.

For some random reason, I decided to aim the camera down towards the floor and try some shots from that angle. I’ve tried this before and never been able to get into the frame properly. I should probably point out here that I have zero kinesthetic awareness, and no spatial ability either. I’m sure I would be at disorder or diagnosis level if I were to get tested for this, but I don’t know what tests I would take or what diagnosis would fit – all I know is that I barely can get myself into the frame when the camera is dead-on; if I try any sort of interesting angle I tend to get lost and not know where to stand. I am also one of those people who does not know what to do if you tell them turn your head to the right or raise your right hand. Giving me any sort of physical direction is a disaster as my body does not respond to verbal commands; there’s just very little mind/body connection with me in that regard. So, when I chose to aim the camera so far down I figured I wouldn’t get one decent shot out of it, but I surprised myself by getting loads of good ones (although none of them looked as I’d visualized them to look, and the results were random as I was unable to actually plan for anything – it was like shooting in pitch blackness to me):

I ended up having a lot of fun editing these weird shots, so the day wasn’t a total loss. Here are my three favorites from this shoot:

And by the way, when looking over my photos I noticed that two of the test shots I did inside were almost the exact same pose and position, but one was before I applied my makeup and one was after (always gotta test shot the makeup when you think it’s done to be sure nothing is amiss with it), and I thought it might make an interesting before and after collage, so what the hell – I’ll throw this one in too.

Thank God for cosmetics.