No-bummer summers

What a difference time makes. Twenty years ago, I hated school with a murderous passion, a byproduct of the manufactured pathos only a middle schooler can muster. Now school kids make me jealous. If it wasn’t illegal, insane, and morally reprehensible, I’d find an eight grader and karate chop him in the kidneys.

 

But that’s just because I’m petty. See, with school winding down, the sidewalks will soon be choked with kids riding skateboards and bicycles. Girls will spend half the day jumping rope in their driveways, while the boys who pretend not to like them waste whole afternoons in front of game consoles, chugging Diet Mountain Dew and playing Grand Theft Auto online with Indonesian car salesmen. They’ll be awash in a seemingly endless expanse of freedom, with no responsibility, no obligations, and possibly no clean underwear.

 

It’s summer vacation, and I want it.

 

Who doesn’t, really? Think about how amazing it would be to just up and leave work for two-and-a-half months, with nothing to do between now and September but dig beach sand out of your toenails and read badly-written books about teenage vampires. Then, when you come back in the fall, you and your co-workers can exchange notes on how much everyone has changed, and blow off the first week kicking around Hacky Sacks and making out in stairwells.

 

Or maybe kids don’t do those things anymore. They probably have making-out apps for their phones or something.

 

Regardless, it would be a pleasurably disorienting experience reverting back to those old patterns. The thing about time is that it’s relative; the older you get, the more days you’ve got under your belt, and the more quickly each successive one passes – until, by the end of your life, a single day seems to take about as long as the local sports roundup on the evening news, albeit with decidedly less emphasis on high school field hockey. Time is a funnel, its sands accelerating as it reaches bottom, and so the depressing thing about adulthood  – aside from everything – is that once we realize how fleeting it is, it’s too late. We’re caught up in work and bills and planning and saving and re-doing the tile in our kitchens, and we forget to grasp at small moments and hold on to them, squeeze out of them everything we can before they flutter away on the breeze like tulip petals. Plus we start wearing plaid socks. Tacky.

 

A child, meanwhile, is new to the game. They’ve got a shorter frame of reference. Give them a single day – no school, no sports, just a stick and some dirt and a lazy afternoon – and it’s a vast expanse, a slow-trickling infinity. The phrase “summer vacation” lights up a kid’s brain so much because they know, intuitively, what it means: A never-ending succession of such days. An expanding universe of formless, shapeless time. It’s a great opportunity to get the really important things done, like drenching friends with Super Soakers, and reading comic books in the hollows between tree branches. Not to mention breaking things with baseballs, which is usually followed by interminable days grounded in your room, your only company the California Raisins doll you got for being a good boy when you were four.

 

That’s totally a non-specific example. Cough.

 

Yet few of us realize what we’ve got until it’s gone. Irish playwright and ZZ Top impersonator George Bernard Shaw once said, “Youth is wasted on the young,” and boy, was he drinking his insight juice. Only now, with our joint pain and exfoliating moisturizers, do we recognize the fleeting preciousness of those structureless summers. If every toddler was given a 50-hour-a-week desk job for a year – something banal, with lots of file-moving and pencil-sharpening – maybe we’d appreciate those aimless mornings flinging boogers at stray cats.

 

I’m reminded of sixth grade, and not just ’cause of the booger thing. I was part of a program called SPARK, a “gifted and talented” program geared toward children who are expected to achieve great things in life, like writing columns about cereal and toll booths. As the school year wound to a close, all the SPARK students from Lewiston’s various elementary schools gathered in a central location for a big pre-summer brain-off, a series of debates over the course of three days. For the first two days, the debates were one-on-one, with a third child acting as judge; but on the final day, two teams of four squared off against one another. I was a judge on that last day. The topic: Summer vacation. One team was to argue for it, the other against it. 

 

My strategy as judge was to chew on tufts of grass and merely pretend to listen, but some of the debate must have seeped through, because to this day I remember that the anti-vacation group had a remarkably mature and well-reasoned argument. The super fine details have been obfuscated by thousands of days and about 150 vodka martinis, but the basic gist was that productivity would be higher, students would learn more, and there wouldn’t be that inevitable summer IQ drop, what with kids putting aside their books in favor of Nerf balls and remote-controlled cars. All of this is true.

 

The pro-vacation group’s argument went something like this: “It’s summer vacation! Come on!”

 

This is also true.

 

The American educational system gets a lot of flak for being super crappy, mostly because it’s super crappy. It’s been suggested that abolishing such a large vacation would help, and you know, it very well might. But children would lose something valuable, whether they truly appreciate that time or not. Decades removed from the SPARK debate, it’s not cosines and quadratic equations and the boiling point of mercury that stoke my wistful recollections; it’s the 2 o’clock breezes on cool summer days, The Amazing Spider-Man clutched in one hand, a Moxie float in the other. All that time. It’s silly and unrealistic to fantasize about a similar break occurring in typical adult life, but if it wasn’t for silly and unrealistic fantasies, we’d all go nuts and start punching department store mannequins in their stupid faces. Every beach trip or summer hike is a throwback to an earlier period, when for all intents and purposes, that’s all life was.

 

Of course, we adults get to quaff Seabreezes and watch movies with boobs in them. So it’s not like we’ve got it all bad.

 

Black cats and ladder luck

Note: This column originally ran in the Journal Tribune this past Friday the 13th.  Timing is everything.  Since I'm posting this to the ol' bloggeroo six days later, let's just pretend it's still the 13th, yeah?  That way I won't look like I'm late to the party.  ~J

 

My father celebrated his 13th birthday on Friday the 13th. I know this because I hear about it endlessly.

 

He’ll use any excuse to remind people, and by “people,” I mean, “me.” It’s one of his greatest hits. Granted, it’s a cool thing to have happened, and there’s a perverse joy in hearing him talk about it; it obviously tickles him, as evidenced by his infectious giggles every time he trots out this well-worn tidbit. His teary-eyed guffaws are akin to those of a dental patient in the woozy, pre-knockout throes of a horse-leveling dose of novocaine.

 

What each gleeful re-telling hints at, though, is a deep-seeded adherence to superstition. Ultimately, that’s what the fascination over Friday the 13th is about.

 

And my dad’s a smart guy; I think he knows that. But recognizing the silliness of such things doesn’t mean they relinquish the strange hold they have on us.

 

Take knocking on wood, for instance. There are devotees who would swear that if someone says, “I haven’t had a cold yet this year,” and then follows it up with a few raps on a red maple, the statement is protected from jinxing by magical wood fairies that have control over our respective fates. I don’t know if the wood fairies are subjects of a benevolent wood god or if they’re autonomous, Tinker Bell-like creatures, but I’ll bet they end each day trying in vain to remove sawdust from various bodily orifices. Remember, every time you sharpen a pencil, a wood fairy gets its wings.

 

Except – oh, yeah – they don’t exist. And yet people knock on wood anyway. I do it, even though I fully recognize it doesn’t actually accomplish anything. All it does is raw my knuckles and fool people into thinking the Jehova’s Witnesses have come a-knockin’ – which has a value of its own, since it’s sickly satisfying to see people drawing shades and ducking under potted plants like they’re seeking shelter from the A-bomb. In terms of actually achieving something important, the whole superstition falls short. Nobody’s ever passed a chemistry exam because they found an antique cooking spoon and rapped on it with the fervor of a wine-guzzling woodpecker. Yet we do it, because it’s just something you do. After a while it feels weird not to. I guess you could say it’s an ingrained behavior. Zing! Quick, somebody give me a medal for that one.

 

In the case of Friday the 13th, superstition holds that it’s supposed to be an unlucky day, a day of car crashes and bad news and freak household accidents. Most people don’t pay the day much mind; if they notice it at all, it’s to make an off-hand comment to a co-worker or family member: “Oh, hey, it’s Friday the 13th! Better look both ways before crossing the road! Hawhawhaw!” There are few left who still consider it anything more than the incidental convergence of a day and a number.

 

Yet these people exist. Look around; they walk among you. 

 

That they take it so seriously is curious, given that it’s a relatively new phenomenon. It would be one thing if the superstition had been around for thousands of years; beliefs with that kind of lasting power get lacquered onto a culture and become hard to remove, so when someone, say, tosses salt over their left shoulder after spilling some, it’s a deeper idiosyncrasy. It becomes more difficult to distinguish that kind of behavior from that which isn’t goofy. And make no mistake, if you’re flinging seasoning around in hopes that it will improve your life, you are engaging in goofy behavior. Might as well slap a baby with a slab of ham and expect to win the lottery.

 

The fear of Friday the 13th, however, is relatively new. According to my good buddy Joe Internet, the first documented reference to the supposedly unlucky day appeared in the 19th Century, in Henry Sutherland Edwards’ 1869 biography of Italian composer Gioachino Rossini, who died on Friday the 13th. In the grand scope of things, that’s a relatively new superstition. It didn’t take long for humanity to know better, and yet here we still are, talking about a convergence of words and language that allegedly makes you more likely to stab yourself in the face with a rusty protractor. It’s a belief that shows remarkable tenacity considering it’s almost too young to be taking its first baby steps.

 

Tellingly, the superstition changes depending on where you are in the world. Spanish-speaking countries consider Tuesday the 13th a day of bad luck. In Italy, 13 is considered a lucky number, and it’s Friday the 17th they fear. Everyone can’t be right, or there would only be about four days each month during which it’s safe to go outdoors without being trampled by a herd of zebras. A more likely scenario is that the whole thing is hogwash, made up by some dude who just happened to have a really bad day on a Friday the 13th. 

 

For some reason I envision an old-timey cobbler with a handlebar mustache.

 

“Marjorie, I’ve just about had it! It’s bad enough I was attacked this morning by an angry emu, and then, somehow, punched myself in the face whilst shadow-boxing. But now I’ve gone and set my leg hair afire trying to light a fart! I do declare, this has been the unluckiest day imaginable! So all Fridays the 13th shall ever be, without exception! Now hand me my mustache curler, Marjorie, and let’s dig our spoons into that sloppybottom pudding I do love so.”

 

It’s a fun subject for horror movies, I guess, but that’s about the most use I’ve got for this strange fascination. I’ve lived through a lot of these days, and I’ve been punched in the groin by an orangutan in exactly zero of them. That’s allowed me to draw the rather obvious conclusion that Friday the 13th holds no magical powers, influences no outcomes, and decides the fate of precisely no one. If something bad happens today – the way something does everyday – we can chalk it up to coincidence.

 

Which isn’t to knock the allure of coincidence, a different beast altogether. I mean, a 13th birthday on Friday the 13th? Go ahead and tell it to me one more time, Dad. It’s a cool one.

 

Picture this

High school kids have no idea how lucky they’ve got it. Sure, trying to find jobs in a flatlined economy is like combing for lice on the head of a bald man. And college loans saddle people with the kind of debt that could cripple a small country, one where the locals eat weird-looking seafood and wear funny hats. 

 

But they get to pick which senior portrait appears in their yearbooks, which makes me a very jealous man indeed.

 

This is a relatively new phenomenon, brought on by the onset of digital photography. Back in my day – an old fuddy-duddy phrase if ever there was one – we didn’t have that luxury. It’s weird to have grown up in an era that already seems antiquated and lame, the stuff of bell bottoms and teased poodle-hair, but portrait day at school was a lot like a first date: We either made a good impression and immortalized a lasting memory, or else we had spinach in our teeth and came across as graceless chumps. Not that I’ve experienced this. Ever.

 

Each year, it was the same story. While most people in our class were typically clad in garb befitting a mandolin player in a metropolitan subway, portrait day inspired kids to dig their Sunday best out from underneath amorphous laundry piles on their bedroom floors. Suddenly, everyone was dressed like they had an important job interview at Goldman Sachs, all sparkle and polish. The girls were particularly shiny, decked out in necklaces and earrings and kaleidoscopic dresses. It was like going to school inside a giant disco ball, only with more acne and less Kool & The Gang. And there was something electric in the air, a change in atmosphere that ratcheted the already-high intensity level up by about ten degrees. If a normal school day was a laid-back soak in a lake of pheromones, this picture-centric event was a frenetic dog-paddle through an oceanic riptide. 

 

Damn, we looked good.

 

And the reason was simple: This was our one shot. Yes, we could have our portraits re-done if we weren’t happy with the first one, but that was our absolute final chance, a veil-thin safety net. Ideally, we wanted to get it right the first time, or else our yearbook pictures would be all closed eyelids and drooping mouths, cowlicks gone awry. That’s great if you want to show people what you look like hungover in your breakfast nook over uneaten toast, but that’s not what we wanted. We wanted glamor. And candy. And the ability to make farting sounds with our armpits. But mostly glamor.

 

That’s what lent such a sense of urgency to the sessions. We’d file one-by-one into a classroom-turned-studio, cleared of desks to make way for big-deal lighting equipment and backdrops, and as soon as we sat on our stool we’d grope frantically for our model face: That neutral, half-smiling middle ground between certifiably happy and stoned out of our minds. 

 

Every once in a while the photographer, always a bored-looking soul, would re-do our photo on the spot if it was really obvious that something was amiss – an ostentatious blink, a malfunctioning piece of equipment, or, more rarely, an ill-timed alien invasion. Otherwise, the pressure was on to get it right. Remember, this was pre-digital. If any aspect of our portrait fell short – maybe a bra strap was showing, or stray hairs dangling on our forehead conspired to make a swastika – the photographer wouldn’t know it right away. There was no way to check. We had our pictures snapped, and then there was this weird, month-long waiting game while the film was developed and the prints sent back to the school. Kids buzzed excitedly on the day the sealed envelopes arrived, because when you opened the flap and reached for the wallet- and wall-sized treasures within, it was the ultimate unveiling. You got to find out if all the fuss was worth it. If it wasn’t, you were saddled with a picture that made you look like a half-drunk space cadet with wispy sideburns and Hitler hair.

 

Now allow me, dear reader, to reveal something about we here at the Journal that you may not know: We’re all werewolves. Kidding. No, we in the newsroom process and edit all the headshots for the top 10 graduating seniors in each of the high schools we cover, prepping them for publication. Sometimes it’s the top 10 percent. That means sifting through an awful lot of photos, and each one is a reminder of how much times have changed. No longer is each portrait a stiff, wooden-faced affair in front of an inoffensive backdrop resembling the faux marble veneer of a bank. The shots are hugely varied now. Seniors strike cover model poses in front of ivy-lined rock walls; hold bowler hats to their heads on windy days in perennial gardens; pose nonchalantly with acoustic guitars as they sit cross-legged on stone steps abutting river embankments. Cobble enough of these portraits together and you could make a calendar, “Cool Kids of the Northeast: A Study in Confidence.” 

 

And why shouldn’t they be confident? They know exactly what their shots will look like. They can pick and choose. “Oh no, sir, not the one where I’m wearing a kimono and sucking on a lollipop as I stroke my cat. Let’s go with the one that shows me in a propeller hat while I puff on a bubble pipe and ride a unicycle.” For the rest of their lives, these students will be cracking open their senior yearbooks and saying to their children, “Ah, yes, I remember Chet. This is him, here. You can tell he was a prankster by the way he’s got those swizzle sticks dangling from his nostrils.”

 

It’s a perk of the digital revolution, and I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t a little jealous. The safety net is much thicker now, the photos much more personal, and that’s a nice luxury to have. Still, I can’t help the feeling that something’s been lost. It’s the anticipation, I think – the waiting that itches in the back of the mind like a splinter, the Christmas morning feeling of unwrapping the unknown. I guess every generation becomes nostalgic for the way things were “in their day,” and there’s a melancholy in knowing you can’t go back. But in a way, there’s something kind of nice about that. The wistfulness means there was something valuable about the experience of high school; the 18-year-old punk in that old senior photo grew up to be a man who didn’t take it for granted. That’s what a senior photo, or any photo, ultimately is: A marker of time, a yardstick by which we measure ourselves against a past.

 

If that past reveals some questionable choices involving a top hat and monocle in the rubble of an old mill, well, hey. At least your eyes weren’t closed.

 

Understanding underthings

Men are gross.

 

This is hardly news to anybody who’s ever met one, lived with one, or been one. We’re hairy. We spit. Our sweat smells like a pile of dead tree frogs in a humid swamp. When a hidden body part itches, we scratch and scratch until it and our hands share most of the same molecules. We think nothing of rubbing the bellies of strange dogs, and we shovel food into our mouths like starving refugees, sometimes while rubbing the bellies of strange dogs. We’re dispensaries for various greenhouse gases.

 

Yet these sins would have a slim chance of being forgiven, if only we could figure out a way of improving the underwear situation. Given enough time, a man’s undergarments are a microcosm for everything funky and off-putting about the human species, a case study in why we wear clothes in the first place. If you come across a man’s underwear and it isn’t the most frightening thing you’ve ever encountered, then either the underwear is brand new, or the man wearing it is a department store mannequin. 

 

I say all this, naturally, from a man’s perspective, and with a blind eye toward the travails of a woman’s own underthings. Were a woman to hover over my keyboard at this very moment, she might whisper, “But Jeff, our garments are also subject to funkification.” And that may be true. Thing is, men don’t care. When we encounter a woman’s undergarments, they’re either thrown into the general mass of laundry, or else it’s showtime at the Apollo and our minds are preoccupied. In this situation, women’s wear could be coated with the grass-clumped road grime from a trucker’s mud flaps and we wouldn’t notice.

 

Boxers, briefs, jock straps; it doesn’t matter. With enough time and use, they’re all abominations.

 

In part, this is due to a general difference in the sexes’ overall clothing philosophy. A woman’s take is sensible, sane: When an article of clothing shows signs of aging or distress, it is discarded or relegated to the bench, only to be used when pinch-hitting in an emergency situation. 

 

A man’s philosophy is strictly functional and pragmatic: I have paid money for this item, and I will wear it until it absolutely disintegrates.

 

Oh, and we do. At the end of its life, a man’s underwear looks like a shredded flag on a war-torn battlefield. Gather a big enough pile and it could eat through the hull of a submarine.

 

A clue as to why our not-so-frilly underthings are so offensive can be found in a commercial that aired recently during a late-night TV program. The spot begins with a graphical depiction of a pair of briefs, with a bright pink spot glowing on the crotch, which in ad-speak has become the universal symbol for absorbancy. Then the camera pans away from the graphic and sweeps over a burly manly-man walking toward the screen, clad in the kind of plaid work shirt that screams, “I have handled tools and machinery. My testosterone levels are high enough to paralyze a sea urchin.”

 

Manly Guy stops in the center of the frame, and in a booming baritone that could blow the hubcaps off a Jaguar, he asks his audience, “Do you suffer from drippage?”

 

Three seconds in, and I knew this was my favorite commercial of all time.

 

For the ad’s duration, Manly Guy employs his grit and swagger to extoll the virtues of this revolutionary new underwear, geared toward men whose natural functions sometimes have a mind of their own. The man’s overwhelming guyness is clearly an overcompensation for the embarrassing nature of a sensitive condition, which ads a sad poignancy to the spot’s inherent ridiculousness. It’s comedy and tragedy compressed into 30 seconds of air time. I laughed. I cried. Ironically, I nearly wet myself.

 

Now, to be clear, there’s nothing funny about incontinence. It’s a serious ailment, with demoralizing psychological consequences for its sufferers. But the ad made clear that the underwear wasn’t intended for incontinents; there are different products for that. No, this telling invention is supposedly geared toward those whose functions occasionally misbehave, dabbling (pun intended) in the biological equivalent of a misdemeanor, a lapse in the accepted protocol. Are there people who could legitimately benefit from this? No doubt. If I know men, though – and I do – then I can almost guarantee that a majority of the customer base will be guys who just aren’t careful enough, bypassing the requisite three shakes at the urinal so they can get the hell out of Dodge. Men do this for two reasons: Either they’re sloppy, or the dude standing next to them is making weird grunting sounds and smells like a dead whale covered in cigarettes.

 

Yeah, that happens.

 

The call of nature isn’t the sole reason why men’s underwear tends to become so objectionable. It probably isn’t the most common. What I think it boils down to is something more fundamental in the male biology – an odorous and cotton-ravaging byproduct of our utilitarian bodies. We create it by the very act of moving, of being. That’s why well-worn undershirts and baseball caps tend to not do so hot, either: They’ve been exposed to that uniquely male aura of meat- and beer-fueled funk. We move, we sweat, we stink up the joint. That, in addition to belching our way through SportsCenter, is kind of our thing.

 

So if you see a pair of men’s underwear lying on the bathroom floor, carelessly tossed toward the laundry hamper and missed, there’s a good chance the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention could declare your home a Level 5 biohazard. Remain calm and back slowly toward an exit. And remember: Men are gross. We simply can’t help ourselves.

 

Get over yourselfie

Today is a sad day, my friends. For today, I logged onto an online dictionary, looked up the word “selfie,” and there it was: A definition. The surest sign that the term, and the phenomenon, are here to stay. 

 

In my head, funeral trumpets blared. Of course, in my head I’ve got six-pack abs and can shred on guitar like Van Halen, so maybe that doesn’t actually mean anything.

 

The death I’m mourning is of a time when people actually took photos of things other than themselves. I say this sanctimoniously, having taken plenty of photos of myself over the years, looking in most of them like a perfect jackass, which I guess is unavoidable. But here I’m going to attempt a rather daring feat of logical gymnastics: I’m going to defend my own selfie-taking, blast that of others, and try to avoid sounding like a hypocritical windbag. Can I actually do it? Start making your bets. Vegas odds are against me, two-to-one.

 

In case you’ve spent the past year carving soapstone chess pieces in a Turkish dungeon, a selfie is a photo someone takes of themself with a digital camera or smartphone, with a telltale camera-holding arm snaking out of the frame, giving us pristine views of biceps clad in Hello Kitty sweatshirts. These selfies typically end up on some social media site, usually Twitter or Facebook, and most capture the subject in one of three facial expressions: 1) I’m awesome, so deal with it; 2) I’m really awesome, so deal with that; or 3) someone just clocked me in the noggin with a cinderblock and I don’t know where I am. Number three is generally a little closer to the truth.

 

They’re ubiquitous, these selfies, more prevalent than the clap at a weekend music festival. It’s a shame, too, because even though it’s a mostly mindless time-suck, I actually don’t mind Facebook. It’s a nice way to keep loose tabs on old high school acquaintances without the added burden of having to give a crap. Plus you can take a quiz to find out which Star Wars character you are. I’m Obi-Wan. Word.

 

But while it makes for an entertaining five-minute excursion, I can’t log into my Facebook feed without scrolling through a bazillion throw-away snapshots of friends with sunglasses larger than their actual heads. These are people I love and respect, good friends with whom I’ve shared memories, laughs, and in some cases, monstrous hangovers. Swell folks, these friends of mine. Yet for some of them, when you stick a camera in their hand, they become a one-person fashion studio, a photographer and model at once, except they’re not very good at being either. Photographers generally don’t take blurry, overexposed portraits in front of a Target, and you don’t see many models who look like they’ve just taken a sip of curdled milk. Actually, strike that last bit. You kinda do.

 

Selfies are so pervasive that they’re actually spawning their own vocabulary. Professional portrait photographer Peter Hurley made headlines recently on several entertainment and lifestyle blogs when he revealed a supposedly hot tip for looking better in one: He calls it “squinching.” While it sounds like something you do to put the brakes on an impending bowel movement, squinching is a way of controlling your eyes which apparently makes you look more confident and attractive. Without full-on squinting, you sort of narrow your eyes from the bottom, tightening your lower lids to give the impression that you’re a wizened sage, or a quiet cowboy gazing off into the middle distance. Hurley said it’s a trick employed by celebrities on the red carpet, which explains why many of them appear as though they’ve just been pelted in the face with a handful of angel dust. 

 

As if selfie-takers needed more encouragement. It’s bad enough they outnumber the population of Zimbabwe; now they’ll bear the look of people trying to read the bottom line of the eye chart at the DMV.

 

If there’s a way that selfies aren’t rooted in narcissism, I haven’t found it. The closest they come to not being borne of an unhealthy self-interest is when the subject is documenting weight loss; even then, the line is a fine one. A friend of mine whose fake name is “Janet” has lost an impressive amount of weight over the past few years, and when her fitness journey first started, she would post periodic photos of herself so we could track her progress; this inspired friends, myself included, to encourage her with positive comments and various forms of affirmation. That I get. It was a self-esteem boost for Janet, and a means for her circle of acquaintances and confidantes to provide an electronic support system, a cyberspace army of cheering multitudes. It was nice getting those updates.

 

At first.

 

Thing is, Janet’s been super fit for a couple of years now. Don’t get me wrong, it’s wonderful that she’s attained her goal; but we still get updates. And they’ve gotten more salacious. I’m talking lingerie, sexy mood lighting – the kinds of images that would get me in trouble at the public library. Now ordinarily, I wouldn’t mind these kinds of photos, for obvious reasons. (Ahem.) But at this point it’s no longer the chronicle of an inspirational journey. It’s hey-look-at-me.  Which, when you get right down do it, is what social media is mostly about.

 

So sure, I’ve done it. Of course I have. I’m under 35 and I own a digital camera; I can’t beat those odds. Here’s how I justify it, though: I’ve been taking them since before social media existed, beginning with an old 3.1 megapixel dinosaur – one whose photos looked like they were taken at dusk through a window coated in volcanic ash. Christmas, 2003. I opened the box, saw the camera, and since that moment I’ve been shooting absolutely everything. Every social gathering. Every holiday. Every birthday. And when appropriate, myself. What I’ve built, over the past 12 years, is a photographic record of my life, and it would be strange if I wasn’t occasionally in it. Does that make me a narcissist and a hypocrite? I don’t know. It’s not for me to say.

 

But it’s my defense, and I’m sticking to it. I’m not certain whether I beat those Vegas odds, but I’m sure I’ve got a legion of Facebook followers who’d love to tell me. They just need to put their cameras down first.