life was pronounced extinct

last night i took some self-portraits. when i uploaded the photos i deleted most of them, as is usual. but a few of them i liked. looking at them gave me the impression of change. as though maybe i'm an adult now. it was a nice moment.

preceding this was a night of facebook spying on people i used to know, mostly those i went to school with. it became a household venture and we compared notes on long gone acquaintances. strangely, a lot of people i went to school with are fans of hey hey it's saturday. i remember watching it in early high-school and being quite into it then. but that was 1987!

i wonder if staying where you grew up, settling down with someone from school, and having a truckload of kids means that not a lot changes from 1987 until now. well, obviously having kids is a change, but yeah, i just can't imagine.

many of them have their kids as their profile picture. and one person's 'about me' section only gave details of who she was married to and her kids names and ages. fuck!

must admit, there was a smug satisfaction in seeing that people hadn't changed, that people were burdened with kids and ugliness. guess i still resent my high-school. i feel a sense of achievement in transcending that place, those values, the hopelessness of it all. though maybe i haven't transcended it at all, because there i was, last night, looking back.

and maybe this is what changed my visage in those photos, or my reading of those photos. regardless, i like being an adult. so i hope the feeling stays.

and returning to the theme of death, i was earlier reading about a british tv guy whose life was pronounced extinct. so says a scotland yard spokesperson. i stumbled over this expression and can't stop thinking about it. it's both horrible (official, cold, blankfaced) and poetic. a phrase that arrested me, in reading about this man i'd never heard of.