6:07 a.m. - Sunday, Mar. 16, 2003
The Real and True Face of Ms Leslie

Well, I mostly pissed the day away, fooling around with the template on my diary. Just as I do in so many other areas of my life, I work against myself when I try to make changes. For instance, I wanted to have the last five entries show up on my page. No problem. Andrew has left instructions somewhere on how to make that happen. So I start going down the list of places where answers might be on Diaryland until I find out how to make the last five appear. Then I decide that having the previous and last links are redundant, so I delete them. But then I realize that if someone is going from front to back in my diary, I�ve now made it a lot harder5 for them because they have to go to my archive after every entry so they can go to the next one.

Of course now I�ve forgotten what I deleted, so it�s back to the Diaryland place, click through the pages until I find where I can re-learn how to make the �Look Back� �Move on� Links happen again. I�m smart; I really am. But my short term memory is absolutely unreliable. I make the same three or four mistakes three or four times each before it finally dawns on me that I�m in familiar mistake territory. Once I start to recognize the mistakes like smelly relatives, I can gradually stop repeating them. Finally, on the umpteenth attempt, I get the links back to the way they were when I first started. Like four hours of work and I�m proud as I can be because I made it all the way back to square one. Then I can move on myself, to see if I can figuer out how to use the three fields Andrew mysteriously gave me.

While I was thrashing around this way, I was considering whether to provide a �before� photo of my face. Yes.. you�re smart too. You must realize that the pictures that are here all the time are partly illusion.

I went to a studio just a few weeks before it was time to leave for my SRS. I asked the lady there to help me with my makeup and hair and then to take the very best and most flattering pictures of me she could.

After taking literally dozens of photos, We sat down and chose a few to keep. Most of those we touched-up to remove some of the bags and wrinkles from my eyes and face. So what I�ve displayed represents my very best efforts on my very best day. The morning me is a lot different. I�ve been wondering if it was fair to show only my best face and hide the morning me. I thought maybe I needed to make a record of that face so there would be something to compare the new face to.

Then I thought��. NAH!

I�ve not always been honest, but honesty has always been one of the most important things to me. I�ve tried hard to be honest always and when I haven�t been, it�s been hard on my self esteem. But I�m starting to feel now that there are some things I don�t have to share� unless I want to. And if I�m asked to share, then honesty becomes an option.

Please never ask me my age. Henceforth, I will lie. Today I�ll be 23. Tomorrow I�ll be 97. Nor will I divulge my true weight on request��� even though I am posting it publicly at the moment. I�m only doing that for me, not for the morbidly curious. Besides, my approximate weight is public anyway. I wear it everywhere I go. But my face� now this is kind of new to me. I�m not obligated to let anyone see me in an uncorrected state. If I can smudge the lines of time a little bit, It�s my right to do so. Why should I advertise the worst aspects of the face I already don�t like?

Here�s a consolation prize though. All those photos were loaded onto the photographer�s website. I suppose they�d like it a lot if my mama would go there and order more pictures from them. If you go there, you can see all three pages of the photos taken on that day which was, as I said, the best I could do. You�ll be prompted for a password. Use 6678.

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