| So i was working at this computer camp. And one of the things i was in charge of doing at that camp was designing the camp's webpage. So a couple weeks later i find myself alone in a room, sorting through video clips, looking for pictures. It wasn't supposed to happen this way. I was expecting to just do the HTML and the layout and the structure; i wasn't expecting to have to do the content myself. I just put on some abstract pictures of feedback and waited for Robert to get me some pictures of the actual camp. He never did. Instead he waits a couple weeks and then leaves me with the video editing software and all the video clips from the stuff he filmed with that damn digital video camera he's been carrying around for a week. Well, at least i don't have to take the pictures myself, i guess, but i still don't know what i'm looking for. I don't know what's here. I'm just looking through the list at random trying to find any framegrabs that work, and i'm not..
::blinks:: That's me.
Randomly in the list i find a video clip of me, of that dumb seminar thing i gave last week on INTERCAL and the ioccc and joke programming languages. Explaining the COME FROM statement in INTERCAL. He was filming that..?? I didn't notice him filming, didn't notice him standing there.. had no idea. Odd.. and now i hover unexpectedly over the mouse button, uncertain, trying to decide whether or not i really want to see this.
And i press play. And i spend the next couple minutes watching in a state of shock, completely unable to come to grips with the well of repulsion and self-loathing that completely fails to materialise as a result of seeing myself on video. Constantly as i watch i realize that some question or other i would expect to be asking myself here, a question along the lines of is my voice really that high?, is somehow failing to be a problem.
I discover that my voice isn't that high. My hair is fucked up, but it doesn't look stupid. I don't look disgustingly lame. The hand gestures i assumed made me look like i had some kind of muscular disorder, as it turns out, don't look anything other than perfectly natural. My greatest fear in the universe-- that i talk way too fast and babble incoherently whenever understanding what i'm saying becomes important-- fails to be legitimate.
And so the clip ends and i continue on, probably visibly shaken, as inside i am wracked by the extremely odd process of a system of self-loathing having to re-evaluate itself. | 
