Keeping a Lid on the World of Me

Despite having a blog, I still haven’t fully embraced Twitter or Facebook. I’m scatterbrained enough and already consume too much media during the course of a day, so something has to give. Maybe when I have a book or some such product to hawk, I’ll rev up my social media machine.

Meanwhile, I want to preserve some semblance of humility and privacy for as long as I can. Which brings me to this hilarious post by Joel Achenbach, in which he compares his tiny “archive” of  childhood pictures to the endless digital stream produced by today’s kids:

In one photo in this very small archive, I’m seen as a toddler in my mother’s lap, and look remarkably happy, if rather simian. Someone off-camera may be offering me a banana. My mother somehow manages to look luminous despite being an overworked, single Mom, selling fabric at Sears (the company back then paid men more than women for the identical job because men supposedly had families to support) and trying to keep two boys from burning down the house.

In my dresser there’s a picture of me looking alarmingly dopey and scruffy and in need of a haircut. I’d throw it away but, as I said, there aren’t many of these photos in existence, and although I’m a very humble and modest person I do feel like I ought to keep something around for the biographers.

Me too, especially the ones with my full head of curly locks (that I hated as a boy) still intact.