A Picture is Worth...

Boy, do I envy people who photograph well. Whenever someone takes a picture of me, I invariably look hung over, with my face flushed and fake smile askew. It is, to be honest, mortifying... which is why you won't see any of these photo gems posted on my blog. (Of course, I don't seem to have a problem posting a picture of me wearing a dickish swim cap on my blog, but bad lighting — that's another issue entirely.)

It's been a problem plaguing me pretty much from birth and ignored by my parents because they thought I was always "so cute." At least if you're an ugly kid — and your parents aren't in denial about it — the parents can work to make you a little more attractive, using, say, makeup or hair product or plastic surgery. But when your parents honestly, truly, naively believe that you'd be eye candy for any girl, that's when you're screwed. For reasons unknown, from the moment I had hair, my mother insisted that I have bangs down to my eyebrows and a fuzzy coif that could double as a feather-duster in an emergency. (In the summer after sixth grade, my family took me on a six-week trip to Italy — the only cool thing I've ever done with them — and, to my mom's horror, I had my haircutter shear off six weeks worth of hair and I never looked back. Now if only they could take some of that hair they cut off and glue it to my chest...)

As you can tell from my swimcap mugshot, I also got the corrective lenses gene, and Mom and Dad thought I was too irresponsible — what with my straight A's and spending hours a day in the library reading the encyclopedia — to get contacts as a young'un. They're like Spanish: either you learn 'em young when you don't mind poking yourself in the eye, or you don't learn 'em at all. I spent many years thinking acne scars were beauty marks, and, just to top off the selective-breeding-gone-wrong dweebishness that was my countenance, I was an orthidonture victim from fifth grade, when braces were cool, until tenth grade, when they were way beyond passe. All the time, Mom reminded me that I was cute, rather than the Frankenstein's monster that I was.

Thus the memories: me as a kid who couldn't get it together. Nowadays, I think I do a little better with the look on a moment to moment basis, but the photographs, like I said, don't tell the same story. Which I find frustrating on several counts. Aside from appearing in the background of random Japanese tourists' home videos, I don't find myself the subject of a photo all that often, so when I do have the good fortune to be recorded for posterity, I'd like to look, uh, not retarded if that's at all possible. Not only is it disappointing on its own to see myself in a moment not knowing how to smile, but I realize that, thanks to the digital age, other people also have copies of me at my most mediocre. Who knows... I may even be someone's desktop wallpaper, or they might be distributing pictures of me like its the Paris Hilton sex tape. (That's two too many Paris Hilton references in a week.) I can't even Photoshop the shame of my dour image away.

All I want is to preserve myself at my best, and I think that's going to take some practice posing in front of the mirror in order to get it right.