Incredible graphic technology

I work at this retail place a couple nights a week.  There is a security monitor behind the counter.  It cycles through the 3 or 4 cameras that are trained on the section I work in.  One of those is a view of the counter itself.  We employees watch ourselves on video.

This was both new and disturbing.  I’m the least visual person you’ll ever meet.   I rarely have time or inclination to look at myself.  I generally brush my teeth with my glasses off.  My hair is so short it doesn’t need to be brushed.  My lovely wife tells me when there is something scary stuck in my teeth.

Bottom line: I’m pretty well out of touch with what I look like.

In my heart, I’m about half my age: sometimes I think I’m 18.  I think my hair is these flowing blonde locks that flow half way down my back.  I think that my hair line actually starts where a hairline is supposed to start.  I think that I’ve got the suggestion of definition to my muscles, from the hours of martial arts practice I used to engage in.  I think I’m dressed in some wacky artist version of hip.

And so it was deeply disturbing, that first time I looked at myself. 

The image in the screen had this beginning of a gut.  He was wearing this boring, adult, polo shirt.  His head was shaved.  He was not an ugly guy… he just… well, he just looked like some ordinary, boring adult. 

But then I realized something: that couldn’t possibly be me.  My retail job, they must have invested in some sort of bizzare graphic imaging program.  It wiped out the actual image of me and replaced it with that … boring adult.  I’m not at all clear why they did this.  But they must have.  There is no way that guy is me.  He’s got a fricking bald spot blossoming in the back of his head, amidst all the stubble!!!

In my heart, I know it is me.  But there’s lots of things I don’t know:

Do you have an image of yourself that is disconnected from how you actually look?  

Is my thing an age thing?  Is it that I want to be a teen ager?  (Even when I was that age, I remember my first serious girl friend calling me “Peter Pan” because I was so determined not to grow up.) Or is that I want so desperately to be cool, and it’s harder to look  cool and be a  dad/working professional?

Is it good or bad that I want to look special, different, unique?  In the afterlife, will I look all cool, or will I reach some level of maturity where I won’t desire to be all hip?