Gecko Bloggle

In which our hero finds himself endlessly fascinating, and thinks everyone else will agree with his take on things.

Ooh!  Lookie Me, I’m A Reflecto Ninja!

Can you see around corners in your house?  I can, sorta.  Meaning, I know where every single reflective surface is in the place.  I think it comes from wearing glasses from a fairly young age, and learning that I had what were essentially rear-view mirrors in my periphery.

Also, probably owing to some dyslexia, I got pretty good at flipping things horizontally a few times to decide what the most likely usage of a particular letter might be.  Comes in handy when you’re looking in a mirror or two to see whether or not there’s a junkie on the porch (it’s happened a few times) without actually being directly visible from the outside.

Where was I going?  Oh yeah, I’m fascinating.  Maaaaan of mysteryyyyyy…

I have two theories I’d like to share, wanna hear them?

#1 Facial Proximity Theory

I often thought that fans who become stalkers of movie stars do so because the stars in question have a lot closeups and long drawn out scenes.  I think it’s the virtual closeness.  That big old face up on the screen looks about the size of a person sitting right in front of you.  Like, next to you on the couch.  Intimacy, y’know?  Over time, like many movies, or many rewatchings, those closeups turn into a feeling that you know this person.  That they’re someone in your tribe.  That they’re “people we know.”

A number of years ago, I started following the blog of a friend of a friend of mine, and while there was text content that gave me a little insight into their personal life, but I found myself feeling like I knew this person.  Like they’d be someone I’d get along with, or hang out with.  I was thinking maybe my inner 12-year-old was having a little crush or something, but after the tiniest bit of soul-searching I ruled that out.  I couldn’t figure it out, but now I think I have a theory.

It’s because I was constantly seeing her face.  Like photos of her, that she’d taken almost daily.  Many different expressions and things, but mostly neutral, and aside from the occasional “Hey, check out how fierce my freakin’ ARMS are getting” photos, they were mostly her face.

I think of this because on Saturday, I went to the bank, and they had a big poster of one of the account managers.  Like, humongous.  Just a head shot.  While I’m standing there in the line, I’m looking at this guy, his face about six times larger than anyone else around, and thinking to myself “Man, that’s gotta be weird to see a headshot of yourself that freakin’ HUGE every day.”  But a moment later, he (the real guy) walked past me, and I was like “Hey look, it’s that guy,” and thought for a moment that I’d say something.  Not that I should, but one of those vertigo Oh-No-Don’t-Talk-To-The-Crazy-Person moments.  It occurred to me that I wanted to talk to him ’cause I felt like we’d just been standing in line together here for five minutes, so we had some kinda bus-stop bond going on.

There’s diminishing returns on this stuff though, and I think it has to do with scale.

I remember when I was doing onsite work for the Director’s Guild of Canada’s office in Yaletown, there would occasionally be resumes or applications that’d been formatted to include a headshot/photo of the applicant (probably because folks applying to Production Assistant positions didn’t realize they didn’t need to include their photo, ’cause everything up to that point had been revolving around the possibility of getting in front of the camera at some point).

Anyhoo, these resumes would sometimes be called “Stalker Resumes,” because the photos would often belong to people who would later turn into weirdos (that looks like an operating system or something, WeirdOS – probably exists out there somewhere in the land of Linux) who would even LATER be banned from the building.  It was one of those jokes because we’re a little nervous, and we’re a little nervous because this correlation had happened a few too many times.

So I wonder if the sort of person who included a photo on a resume where it wasn’t required was ALSO the sort of person who would try to force this same type in Virtual Intimacy I’m talking about?  Hmm.  I’ll have to ask around some of my ladyfriends.  Wonder if they’ve even been given a huge poster of someone to make them feel like you knew them already.

Oh wait, that’s what rock posters were all about.  Oh right. Teen magazines, too.  When I go to Shoppers tonight for our daily fix of caffeine, I’ll have to spin through the magazine sections, and see which brands of what are trying to make me love them (that aren’t fashion or beauty magazines).  Any guesses?  I’m thinking music magazines will be the biggest faces, shooting for that teen-to-twentyfive range.  Help you connect with the band by listening to their stuff while having their face on your coffee table, next to the pizza box.

Oddly, I suspect certain genres, let’s call them Mentertainment mags (FHM, Maxim, or Rawr!I’mAScaryTattooLady) will NOT have any closeups.  No intimacy, just cleavage.

And no, I’m not trying to justify me perusing the dirty section in the magazine isle.  Besides, this is the West End, baby.  I would probably get more information on this topic by look at OUT or whatever.

#2 The Other Proximity Theory

…will have to wait until tomorrow.  The dishes won’t do themselves, y’know.

Oh, and the cable’s gone all fuzzy, which either means I’ve missed a hookup somewhere when I moved everything around today, OR the guys in the workroom downstairs are stealing our cable again.