Going Paperless, and the Ensuing Consequences
I recently vowed to myself that I would begin the long and arduous task of going paperless. I’ve already been paying all of my bills online for the last 3 years, my taxes, and all tax-related documents are contained on my computer (have I revealed too much?), and the only paper mail I receive are The New York Times and Entertainment Weekly. (Those two being the obvious paper exceptions to my rule. No, but seriously. You can’t ask me to stop those.) After I vowed that my next major purchase would be a Kindle (Yeah, right. Who are you kidding?), I decided that it was time to tackle my archived photos.
Now, Facebook has revolutionized the way I see photographs. I consider myself a relatively adept photographer, especially given my shitty, shitty camera. The thing is, I’ve never actively taken photos before Facebook, because I didn’t have an efficient way to store, catalog, and share photos, without having to wrestle with Snapfish, or, horror, KodakGallery. (Remember, this is before digital cameras were surgically attached to our hips.) And because of this aversion to the process of sharing photos, I almost stopped taking them altogether.
Well… now I have the opposite problem. The few pictures that I have taken, (those that you’ll see range from 1998 to 2004), have just been sitting in a box by my desk for years and years, collecting dust and bedbugs. Speaking of bedbugs, as I was undergoing my massive bedbug purge of Aught-Eight, I thought to myself: ‘I need to throw everything that I own out. Even the memories. I should digitize everything I own. I should digitize that fucking box of photos.’
So here I am, digitizing 5 years worth of photos. It’s going surprisingly quickly. I’m writing this post to personally apologize to every single person who is contained within these photos. We are excused for how we look in recent photos because of the fashion du jour, or a bad angle, or illness - all things that we know are true because we just saw you in real life, like 20 seconds ago. However, when you start heading into pictures from the past; 4 years ago, 6 years ago, 10 motherfucking years ago, you no longer have the oh-so-forgiving barrier of recent memory to whitewash your sartorial sins. I heartily include myself in this bunch. We were truly Sad!-worthy, and most definitely *sigh*-worthy.
So that is my explanation of how and why so many pictures from our (haunted) pasts have surfaced on that Book of Face, and the greater Web of Inter. Again, I apologize. You should absolutely feel free to untag yourself, but know that I put the pictures up for posterity, and for my own edification of personal history.
Enjoy!
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I came across your blog on Technorati. Nice site layout. I will stop by and read more soon.
Mike Harmon