Let Me Take a Selfie

I'm super vain and quite self-obsessed, but I've never expressed it by flooding my instagram account with countless selfies because a) I do not have an instagram account and b) I cannot take a selfie.

I mean, I have a phone. It has a camera. I have occasionally used it to take pictures. Mostly of things, sometimes of places, occasionally my of dogs, and once in a blue moon, of my husband. But never myself. I do have a face, and it is photographable. It's not photogenic, but it doesn't break cameras. To my knowledge. I also have arms. But not, it seems, the required dexterity.

My sweet, stupid mother recently got on that bandwagon of "hey let's begrudgingly take a picture of ourselves without makeup and then blackmail others into doing it too!" People seem to have forgotten that this was supposed to be about cancer awareness. Somehow. I mean, I think cancer awareness is kind of overblown. Does anyone not know about cancer? Is anyone really unaware? I think we got the message. Cancer sucks. Often preventable. Honk your knockers, quit smoking, yada yada yada. I absolutely want to vomit pink all over the place that shit is so overused. But yes. Here's my bare face, and somehow that's related to cancer. Go team!

I was not overly thrilled to be under the gun for this picture, but it's not really gonna kill me. I'm too lazy to wear makeup all the time. Plus, all those beach pictures of me on vacation? Yup. Not wearing makeup. All those sunshiny summertime pictures? Soooo not wearing makeup. So these pictures already exist but apparently aren't good enough, because I posted them voluntarily and failed to point out that, whoa, fresh-faced lady here in all her ginger-ancestry hotness.

So just out of the shower this morning, while getting ready for work, I attempted to take a quick snap of me in my most natural state (well, I wasn't drunk, so I guess it wasn't technically my MOST natural state). It did not go well. You see, my phone has 0 physical buttons. They're all pretend buttons on a touch screen and they pop up depending which application is open. When I'm using the camera function,  I see the little square on my screen it wants me to tap in order to take the picture. Easy peasy. Except when I turn the screen away from myself in order to aim the camera at my own face. Now I'm tapping blind. I am tapping and tapping and I'm either taking tonnes of pictures or none at all and there's no way to tell (since the flash wasn't going off...that's another pretend button) until I bring the camera back in for a look see. It turns out that I was taking pictures, just not necessarily of my face. It's hard to aim a camera without a viewfinder! There were parts of me in most of the photos, but not whole parts, not anything you'd recognize. I must have taken and deleted 2 dozen of these stupid pictures before I tuckered myself out. No selfie.

So I wondered just how dexterous or determined or practiced all these selfie-slaves are. Because my Facebook feed does often clog up with "here's my face in this dark corner" and "here's my same face in a similar looking dark corner" and "here's my wonderful goddamned fucking face again" and "oh, look, me again!" and "man, I never get tired of looking at myself!". They're out there. And frankly, they don't seem to originate from the brightest bulbs, necessarily. So someone's figuring this shit out.

So I asked my husband, who has taken an occasional selfie (the occasion being: he finally got his sorry butt down to the hair place after I've been complaining about his yeti appearance for 3 solid weeks, and I want proof). So, he doesn't have a lot of experience, but I remember that not only did he include his whole head, but even the upper parts of his neck and shoulders! Perfect portrait. God, he's irritating when he's getting something right (especially when I'm not).

Anyway, it turns out that there's this other pretend button that tells the camera to flip around, so you can stare at your hot self in the screen, line up the perfect shot, AND see the pretend button to tap to take the thing! Well hello, beautiful!

Gosh, now I'm starting to see how this can get addictive! My apologies if I start flooding your account with not very original and totally gratuitous and unnecessary pictures of my face. It's just me, spewing my digital narcissism all over the place, doing my part to cure cancer.