I've never made a New Year's resolution. I have plenty of stupid habits formed during years of slovenly bachelorism. If I were more conscientious I might have taken the opportunity to really commit myself to better posture in 09, or maybe come to grips with the habit of picking my nose when nobody's looking. As the giddy fizz of the New Year started to recede, there was one thing that started to gnaw at me. I think I take terrible pictures.
I cannot smile in pictures. Most pictures I see of myself vary between an expressionless glare and a hyper-exaggerated clown face. I first realized this taking my senior portrait for the high school yearbook. The photographer prodded me, tried to trick me into laughing with some scat humor, he even goaded me with a stuffed animal, but the best expression I could give him as a closed-mouth grin.
One woman I used to date called me her science experiment. She liked the fact that she couldn't read my expressions, that everything I said came out in the same warbling monotone, words stumbling over each other like strangers trying to avoid close contact in a crowded subway station. Looking at myself in other people's pictures makes me really uncomfortable.
There is the superficial vanity, the dread that the package you've come in looks like a dented can of peaches in the discount bin at the grocery store. One of the guy's at work took the picture above and posted it on our site after playing a prank on someone else. Some readers were agog at how old I looked. Someone compared me to David Koresh.
I like the photo because I'm smiling, and though it's only half-serious, it's there. The biggest disappointment I have in seeing pictures of myself isn't the ugliness or unflattering angles, it's the disparity between what I remember of the moment and what remains in two-dimension days and weeks after the fact. Seeing myself at parties that where I remember having a great time, then trying to reconcile that with the pursed lips and aloof eyes that stare back from those pictures makes me dizzy.
Smiling for the camera is an admitted fakery. No one can improvise genuine happiness on the spot and sustain it for four or five seconds while staring into a machine's lens. The idea that I'm being recorded for posterity makes me freak out. I feel like I'm trapped in a death rictus when I try and hold a smile. My favorite pictures of people I care about aren't the smiling ones, they're the ones with the least amount of artifice in between, showing the undecorated face, the eyes deliberate and open.
If I could give that face in photographs every time I would. But I want to perform. So I squirm and try to leave something interesting for posterity. And it ends up looking like just what it is, a worm squirming.
My New Year's Resolution: be genuine in photographs.
Previous Posts:
Love Machine: On Your Own, or Moving On
Love Machine: Going to Bed Angry
Love Machine: The Hooker on the Corner
Sex Machine: Having Sex on Inauguration Night
Sex Machine: If You Can Get Me Hard I'll Show You A Good Time
Date Machine: Tool Academy, or Watching TV with Your Girlfriend
Sex Machine: Getting Laid
Love Machine: I Was a Six Year-Old Virgin, or Is There A Happy Ending?
Date Machine: Getting Pierced on a Date
Love Machine: Hitting Snooze on the Morning After
Date Machine: Let Me Seduce You With The Cardigans
Date Machine: I'm Too Sexy For Your Blog
Love Machine: Breaking Up Is Hard To Do, or Leaving Home
Date Machine: Super Macho Man Slumber Party
Sex Machine: Having Sex in Your Parents' House During the Holidays
Date Night: Trying to Behave on a Boring Coffee Date
Sex Machine: Sex with Older Women, or How I Would Make Love to Gloria Swanson
Love Machine: Using Your Words, or I Like Pap