The photo op

OK. So I was wrong. (It's never happened before, so I didn't recognize the symptoms right away.) But it turns out these laptops are pretty darned fun. You can't type for shit on 'em, sure, but photos?! What a blast that photo booth thing is.

So that is what I spent the weekend doing. (Obviously, all you people who actually figured out the whole blogging adventure waayyyyyy back in the day are thinking, Oh God, she is sooooooo 2003. Yeah. So just humor me.)

And along with using up some of that fun family time, the photo episodes got me thinking.

I am supposed to be meeting a fellow blogger in a few days, and she pointed out that since I don't have a photo of myself on my blog, she won't know what I will look like. Now I don't know for sure that she sighed at this point, what with it being an email and all, but I certainly got the impression from her writing that she was sighing - heavily, in fact - at the fact that she was now going to have to stand by the entrance waving uncertainly but hopefully at random people until I get there and... I don't know, poked her. (She has a photo on her blog so I probably won't poke the wrong person.)

So I thought about the whole photo thing, and why I don't have one.

Well, the obvious first reason was that it took me a couple of months to even figure out HOW to upload a photo. Which is why I also am one of the only losers on the Internet planet to have a Blogger template... and not even mind! (Oh, you people are just falling off your chairs, now, aren't you? But really, this is kind of good enough for me.)

Reason number two? So NOT photogenic. In real life, I'm fairly normal. Well, at least I don't see people driving screwdrivers into their eyeballs after I've passed them on the street. So I'm assuming. But you put a camera in front of me, and this is what I'll look like, every time:

Whoa, Nelly!

So that's kind of a problem.



But on the handy other hand, unless you were one of my three male readers, you wouldn't like me much if I looked like this (heck, I wouldn't like me, either):

Yeah. Not me.

Not having a photo on my blog allows everyone to imagine me the way they want to and not be turned off by those quirky things each of us have that make us dislike someone for something weird and intangible like looking snooty or too smart, or something weird and tangible like being too thin, too fat, too made up, or having bad hair.

I confess, too, to a small rush of joy when I track back a commenter to find a 23-year-old hip hop dancer who found enough in common to read my blog and keep coming back. If there was a picture of dorky, frumpy me on the header, it would have sent her packing right off the bat.

Part of me also thinks that what you look like is, at least somewhat, in the eye of the beholder.

For example, this is what Girl and Boy (mostly Boy, really) see when they look at me:

This is what Dog sees:




Man sees this when we're out of wine:

Oh! Whew! You were just kidding!? :

We have a whole case?!:

This is what I see in the mirror after the case: (I've said it before and I'll say it again: sunscreen, people. Look at that skin. Terrible!)

Yeah, because my skin was the problem, here...

But maybe this is the one I'll pick for my blog:




It's just so hard to decide.

We'll see ya' Thursday, Amy!