I woke up too early this morning after yet another late night. However, I'm still in that sleeplike zone where I know nothing important is going to be achieved today so I may as well not bother.
Having checked all my emails and so on, I quickly ran out of things to do and was on my way to looking up images of foxes (don't ask) when my mind took a tangent and typed in "odsox87" into google images...
I don't know why I was surprised that images of me actually turned up, but as I was scrolling through them (there aren't that many), I noticed a surprisingly large amount of photos of nosebleeds that had nothing to do with me. I mean, literally, just random pictures of people with nosebleeds just kind of peppered through images that I recognised as mine. The one thing that they all had in common was the websource. I came to the conclusion that somewhere on this site, "odsox87" must appear.
What I found was a page dedicated to nosebleeds. It's very title, fuck yeah nosebleeds gives it away slightly. Scrolling through these pictures, it suddenly dawns on me that I do have a picture of a nosebleed hidden somewhere on the internet - it must have been found by these nosebleed enthusiasts and added to their vast collection.
And sure enough, there I was, 19 years old again, blood dripping down my face while I stand in my bathroom taking a self portrait.
I remember it had been quite a boring day which had moved on to become a boring evening. I was in first year of University, my first year living away from home (hell, I was on a different continent from my parents!). All I really remember about the nosebleed itself was being somewhat taken aback as I hadn't had one in a very long time, and for it to just happen out of the blue while I'm sitting on my bed minding my own business was just bizarre. As soon as I realised what was happening, I decided I wanted to take a picture of it. Sounds strange, I know but in my mind, there was a strong sense of metaphor attached to that nosebleed. I can't really explain it, it made sense at the time!
Ok, so I'm assuming I'm part of a minority when it comes to taking self portraits of nosebleeds, but on the off-chance that you ever try it, blood clots rather quickly. Within minutes, the nosebleed had actually stopped but the blood on my face had hardened meaning I was restricted to one expression for my photos. And I took a lot of photos. They were predominantly shit which was a massive disappointment as the photos I'd imagined were all beautiful. After I'd washed up and loaded my waste-of-time photos to my laptop, there was only one picture that made any sort of impression on me but the colouring was harsh and saturated. A few tweeks here and there on picassa and I was a little happier with what I'd produced. It still wasn't great but it had a slight eeriness about it which was what I'd been going for originally.
And that was it really. Put it up online and received very mixed reviews. Some people loved it while others thought it was revolting. I still like it, and I'm happy that there are nosebleed enthusiasts out there who accepted my one as worthy enough for their blog. It's strange how these things work out sometimes.
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