Seas of faces

I don't see faces.

Well, I do see them, literally. They have noses and eyes and mouths and hair. (Although I suppose technically faces don't have hair besides eyebrows. Although eyebrows are hair. And actually surprisingly distinctive aka one of my tricks for identifying people).

But I don't always get the point of them.

Eyes are beautiful. They have patterns and colors, and I could stare at them up close for hours and hours (but only of people I like) (because that's inside a personal space bubbles and also it isn't in the eye contact rules. Staring for a very long time close up at the patterns in eyes is not eye contact because appropriate eye contact is not all the time and the point of eye contact is not to literally look at eyes and the patterns of eyes, as far as I can tell. It is to do something else which I am not entirely certain, but people seem to like it.)

I didn't think the Sistine chapel was all that beautiful. It was just faces painted on a flat wall. (Nowhere near as beautiful as all the other churches and cathedrals with patterns and carvings. Or Sagrada Familia! That was absolutely, positively the most beautiful, colorful, awesome place ever.) And it was crowded. 


The first picture is a view of the ceiling somewhere in Sagrada Familia. It has a lot of patterns and loopy symmetry.  The second picture is in the main part of Sagrada Familia. It is of columns headed up to the roof. The columns are curved and branch like trees up near the top. The last picture is stained glass windows (with abstract patterning) with light shining through them from behind. The mirrors on the bottom are long vertical ovals, with small circles interspersed. The windows on top are shaped like a flower.

 Patterns! Patterns! Patterns! And incredible colors (not really demonstrated in these pictures)!*

 Seas of faces. 

 I never really understood the point of putting pictures on my walls of celebrities or people I don't know. (I have pictures of friends and family because those pictures remind me of them, and they make me happy). There would just be their faces, faces I didn't know, staring at me. I would always get marked down in class collages by one teacher because I wouldn't put people in my collages ("There wasn't anything to represent you," she said. But we weren't allowed to use actual photographs, so why would I put faces of strangers there who I didn't know. How could I tell if they represented me or my feelings or whatever ridiculous thing she wanted out of these collages, when they were just faces out of magazines).

I couldn't possibly be faceblind. It's just that I don't try hard enough (I've been told). I don't look at faces long enough. I don't care enough about people to learn their names**. It doesn't matter if I spend hours studying their faces on facebook, trying to figure out how to tell people apart. They all blend into the same people. I identify people primarily by haircut, movement, and context. Not by faces***.

Seas of faces.

 That's what scares me in cities. 

There are seas of faces and all of them have minds. And every mind is thinking. Every mind is a person with their own thoughts and hopes and ideas and ways to think and secret things that get them upset. And they can all see you, too.

It's ridiculously overwhelming.

 But I do like (some) people, and I even like the faces of the people I like (when I recognize them). I'm just not entirely certain why them seem to be the end all-be all for so many people.

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*Mostly I just wanted to show people my pictures (and they are pretty!) and because I like blogs with pictures but I want this to stay private so this is one of the rare opportunities I have to put pictures on, I believe. (I don't have any of the Sistine Chapel because you aren't allowed to take pictures there. And really, it isn't all that beautiful.) Also, sorry if the descriptions aren't that great. I've been looking at the blogs that have pictures, and they seem to have descriptions of the pictures underneath in italics for better accessability, so I am trying to do this, but I'm just really not quite sure how to describe these.
**It doesn't matter that when my sister dresses up to go to a dance, I can't recognize her. Look, I said, that girl has the same dress on as <sister>. How nice.
***In high school, my best friend was intrigued as to how I kept getting the characters mixed up in some old movie we were watching (there were a lot of men in suits and they all looked pretty similar). So she played a game where she put two (different) pictures of the same movie star for a bunch of the old movie stars (Cary Grant, Humphrey Bogart, Gregory Peck, etc.) all scrambled up and tested to see if I could MATCH the people... I couldn't. This was when I first started to realize my facial-recognition skills were abnormally low (I always knew they were awful, I just didn't realize they were unusually bad, since my mother is only a little bit better than I am).

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P.S. I am having serious issues with these pictures. Hopefully I got them to work this time. Does anyone know any expert ways to make them look pretty and wonderful?

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