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Let me take a selfie

If you take a photo of yourself in the forest, and no one is there to see it, did it really happen?

I am baffled by the selfie. There’s something disturbing about capturing every moment of your life in a still. Especially when some of them make you look…well, unattractive.

My kids take selfies constantly. Most of them are cute and charming. (It helps to be a 90-pound teen with clear skin and only one chin.) But they’ll also willingly post pictures of themselves at their least attractive moments, where everyone they know will see them. And they don’t even care!

Well I, myself, care. I have spent the better part of my adult life trying to destroy unattractive photos of myself. This is no small effort in the days where everyone has a camera and is not afraid to use it.

I come from a long line of unphotogenic women. (I don’t think I’m saying anything my familial readers don’t know, but I apologize anyway for airing our genetic laundry.) We are camera-shy. There are so few pictures of us you’d think we’d descended from an all-male line.

My kids, fortunately, take after their father. He is annoyingly photogenic. You can shoot a picture of him after he’s spent a 90-degree day clearing brush, and he won’t even look shiny. For a while, his Facebook profile showed him shortly after a rugby injury. He looked handsome, healthy, and rugged – even though he’s bleeding from the eye. The nerve.

Selfies require skill I don’t have. Maybe my arms aren’t long enough. My selfies all look like they were taken by an ear, nose, and throat doctor. I’m trapped in a vicious circle – it takes some practice to take a good selfie, but I don’t want to practice. I don’t want to look at pictures of myself. If I were being interrogated, I would tell you anything to make you stop showing me unattractive pictures of myself. And they wouldn’t be very hard to come by.

On a recent vacation, while attempting to take a photo of my daughter on her phone, I took a selfie of my nether-regions. “Nice crotch shot, mama,” she said lovingly when she came across it. Snarky, but at least she didn’t post it anywhere.

Sadly, it was one of my better selfies. I actually considered saving it.