Here's Looking at Me

I have the most ridiculous smile. It stretches across my face like a watermelon slice, crinkling my eyes, puffing my cheeks, and making the already-round front of my head wider than it is tall. The problem is I just can't stop it. Once, in college, my friend and I were profiled by a magazine that accompanied its profiles with caricatures. They sent their caricaturist over to sketch us in our daily lives, and he produced picture after picture with that smile dominating my visage. I asked him to try one without the smile, because, truly, I looked ridiculous, and he couldn't do it. I appear to have no face without the smile.

I need a photograph of myself by the end of today. It needs to be a serious photograph--not serious in that I can't be smiling, but serious in that I can't be on top of an Alp, eating a just-picked apple, or standing on one foot making a face in the middle of a field. I woke up yesterday morning in a panic, remembering the photo need, and made S take pictures of me. Don't ever take pictures of yourself first thing in the morning, especially in winter. Enough said about that.

In the evening he took a few more, and general consensus is that they are fine (note: I speak only to general consensus, reserving my own opinion for my self-image support group). Two, in fact, have been deemed thoroughly acceptable, even "adorable" and "great" by the peeps without whom I can make no meaningless decisions (K, reliably, did note that "just your smile is big").

So now, of course, I am stuck with deciding between these two fine photographs, one of which has good color and lacks the smile, but makes my eyes look squinchy and my chin recede (note: the peeps who proffered "adorable" and "great" chose this one). We've adjusted the color on the other, so it's fine, but it features...the smile.

Luckily, I am very busy this morning, so I can't obsess. Then I have maybe an hour in which I can obsess and get about six other things done, and then I am busy again. So the decision will be made one way or another, though I don't think it will make me smile.

Did I mention that I'm also ridiculously vain?