does your profile picture have an interesting origin story or perhaps even an uninteresting one?
Oh yeah it's a pretty uninteresting story actually: when I first made this account (more than a decade ago!! Even though I didn't start actually using it until much later) I had this idea that all my avatars--jesus christ, look at how old I am, it's so sad. My profile pics or whatever you call them for whatever accounts I make in various places would all share the format of being upside-down portraits of famous poets. This was not motivated by a desire to have a consistent recognizable brand, it was motivated simply by a problem I had where whenever I made a new profile at a new place I always got stuck trying to think what to use for the aesthetic elements (name, picture), and this block would often be persistent enough to significantly delay me from engaging with whatever I was trying to join, or even make me not want to bother altogether. (For some reason using the same image across multiple platforms didn't feel allowed, I don't really remember my state of mind all that clearly, it might be useful context to know I was really stupid and a bit crazy at the time.)
So I thought this was a neat solution where whenever I had to make a new account somewhere I could just look for a poet who had a reasonably striking face, turn them upside down, and that would get the ordeal over with quickly. There's no real intelligent concept behind "upside down poets" as a theme, I guess I enjoyed the vague implication that it meant I was in some way anti-poetry or perhaps anti- whatever this particular poet stood for, I liked the idea of people wondering what point I was making? I think? But I never really ended up using it beyond tumblr. I do have a memory of turning Baudelaire upside down at some point, so possibly somewhere out there there's an account of mine with him attached to it, but I have no clue what it was if so, and most accounts I've ever made anywhere don't exist anymore so that one probably doesn't too.
I actually don't think upside down Emily Dickinson really expresses either myself or anything about this blog particularly well, the vibes are kind of a clash imo, but I'm pretty attached to the image anyway, I don't think I'll change it now. She happens to have a face that vaguely resembles my own which is kind of cool albeit entirely unintentional. So yeah there's an origin story but not really a meaning at all, I've barely even read Dickinson tbh.
