The Daily Procrastinator

Because sometimes we all feel like we’re one egg short of a dozen….

Late afternoon sun makes the most of the Paas dye.

I decided that the giant stack of tax paperwork was too large to attempt shredding, so I burned it in my Weber grill.  The color and curve of the paper and ash was so striking, I had to take a picture.

Buh-bye, taxes.

Someone pointed out this cool site, Historic Aerials.  You plug in an address, just like you would with Google maps, and in addition to a fairly recent shot of your chosen address, you can also look at the same site through time.  For example, I can look back at my current address through 10 other years dating back to 1946, a reminder that this area was once nothing but farm land for miles around.

But the big shock for me was to look at my childhood home.  Yes, the homes themselves have been there since the 1930s, but I was stunned to find that the giant oak tree from my backyard was already enormous in the oldest photo from 1958.  It also appears that the property that my high school was built upon was once a farm, improbably located just outside Philadelphia in the middle of a densely populated county.

If you want to get an idea of the staggering growth of Silicon Valley, do a search for 1 Infinite Loop in Cupertino, California, home of Apple Computer, and pan around to see the surrounding area.  It wasn’t all that long ago that the entire Valley was an orchard.  Now it seems that only iPods grow on trees.

I’m having a professional headshot taken on Monday afternoon, a seemingly innocuous act that has me more agitated than I have any reason to be.  It all comes down to my fear of photographers and an extreme discomfort with being the center of attention.

Back when I was 20, a sleep-deprived college student with an email account and no filter on my brain, I sent a flame mail to a fashion magazine.  They, in turn, called me and asked me to turn it into an article, for money!  As a starving student and aspiring writer, I agreed.  It wasn’t until after I wrote the piece and was home for summer break that they told me they were sending a photographer to meet me.

I was living outside Philadelphia at the time, so they sent a very reluctant NY photographer and her assistant down to meet me.  These people were clearly accustomed to working with professional models who had some clue about what they were doing, and had little patience for the fact that I did not.

The outfit I had selected was deemed to be “hideous” and the photographer barged upstairs to my small bedroom, rooted through my closet, told me that I had horrible taste and ultimately selected an outfit that, in hindsight, was not remotely flattering.  At the time, though, I was too intimidated to say anything, and went with her suggestion.

We went to the local park so they could use the gazebo as a backdrop.  There, they took some Polaroid test shots that didn’t look too bad, and dozens of rolls of film.  ”Jesus, can’t you smile?  Look like you’re enjoying yourself,” she’d say.  Then I’d smile and she’d bark, “That’s awful.  Try to look sexy.  Oh my god, what’s wrong with you?  Just make a sexy face, ok?”  A crowd had gathered; my general nervousness had ballooned into “holy crap, the whole town is watching me” hysteria.  Even if I had a “sexy face” — and to this day I’m still not sure that I do — I certainly wouldn’t have been able to express it in front of 100 friends and neighbors.

The ironic thing is that I was built like a real model: tall and rail thin.  The locals all just assumed that I had scored some sort of modeling job, which didn’t seem unreasonable to any of them.  The fact that the picture was to accompany something that I’d written seemed to baffle them completely.

Finally, after what felt like hours, I was finally dismissed with a wave of her hand.  ”We’re done,” she announced suddenly.  ”That’s as good as it’s going to get.”

When the issue came out six months later, there it was: the single most unflattering picture that had ever been taken of me.  People who had known me since birth could not recognize it as me.  

Since that moment, I have avoided professional photographers like the plague.  I have no reason to believe that I would suffer the same fate with Monday’s photos, but the lingering fear and insecurity remains.  So keep your fingers crossed that by Monday night, I’ll have pictures that actually look like me.