our bravest faces

{Sergio Bustamante's "In Search of Reason" a sculpture on the Malecon (boardwalk) of Puerto Vallarta's Banderas Bay. We took a few shots of it, but didn't get a good one. Photo, thus, from here}

We just returned from Puerto Vallarta, Mexico... our first vacation without our kids since.... well... since we've had kids. We've sneaked a night or two here and there, but this was a true getaway. As I go through pictures and post them on flickr and such, I'm thinking about how we like to present a particular picture to the public (and to ourselves, actually) about what we've seen and who we are. I'm not feeling over dramatic about it, like I would have at 18 years old, when I'd probably throw my arm over my face and write a bad poem about masks. I'm just curious about how we can edit and arrange until our story reads clearly, cleanly, evenly, and with a rational arc of narrative. I didn't take pictures of the little bundles of trash that line the streets in PV because I didn't want to include that part. We took some pictures of un-picturesque things, yes, but only because they were odd or funny. And I didn't post the pictures of me that look sweaty and awkward (of which there were plenty, since it's the rainy season, and the humidity was swimmable). Anyway, I'm looking around my house, which is painfully, transitionally cluttery, and thinking of how most moments of time actually lived are very strange combinations of slipped desire and structural groping to make sense of the chaotic pattern of what-gets-thrown-at-us. The reason I don't feel especially dramatic about it is that I think it is actually one of the beauties of being human, this retelling of a story, making links to the patterns that seem the most significant. We all have to choose-- word by word-- what we say to each other, and our spinning of yarns is the thought-food of life. We've all experienced the presentation of a persona that is fully fabricated-- or dressed up crudely to impress (see posts a few back)-- and this is disheartening. But I love being around storytellers who elucidate something about who they/we are in ways that a straight retelling of the facts would never encompass. Is anyone with me on this?