I made this cleaner version of Helen Mirren’s quote in Spanish.
Not because it is elegant. Not because it’s true.
Rather, because I like it.
Loosely translated, it says: “I would tell my younger self to tell people to ‘kiss off’ with greater frequency.”
It is amazing how funny and inspiring it can be to add mosaic or censoring effects to a picture. Almost any picture turns from benign to alarmingly graphic.
Whether it looks like friends and family are flipping the bird or standing naked on the beach, this effect can have startling effects.
The world is full of weird. And we are trained to avoid it and to hide it. The absence of its embrace is evident in all of our routines and haunts. I’m sure that we would be happier if the world looked more like five spilled paint cans, after 10 happy dogs and children scampered through it and touched everything in their path with their polychromatic fingers. Or if your neighbors skipped along the sidewalk instead of walking with their heads down, if you rode a unicycle to work, if plaid were mandatory at parties, and all ties were required to be able to squirt water…
(The picture is of my 3rd great grandfather David Blackshear.)
After doing a few dozen ancestry trees, adding thousands of people to world tree projects, as well as DNA authentication, it is more apparent than ever how intertwined most of us really are. Farmers, royalty, singers, presidents and poets – all of us have them in our past. And no matter what you think you know about your family, it is probably both full of myth and stories infinitely more fascinating than you might imagine. Even at 5,000 years into the past, 200+ generations survived long enough to have a family. Without a doubt, you are related to both the violinist in the orchestra and the child playing the banjo in Deliverance.
P.S. Parenthetically Speaking 