Passports are valid for ten years. This photo is going to stick with me for a while.
I don’t want to pull my passport out for my romantic honeymoon and have my new husband give me the bar bouncer look: Really?
Yes, really, ’til death do us part, REALLY.
The Department of State doesn’t make it easy on you. They have weird new rules for passport photos, like you can’t smile with teeth.
Although they have a point; my resting bitch face is the most true-to-life.
They also suggest that you not wear your glasses to avoid your photo being rejected.
This might make me look better in my photo.
Customs agents don’t make passes at girls who wear glasses.
But as luck would have it, when the day came for me to have my new passport photo taken at the local shipping center, I was suffering from the worst winter cold I’d had all year. My nose was cherry red, my face splotchy, my eyes watery.
Am I doomed to look like a drunk in every form of government ID?
But I couldn’t delay if I wanted my new passport to arrive in time for my trip. So I used every makeup trick I knew to make myself look less like an extra on The Walking Dead.
Somehow, I made it to the store without having to blow my nose and wipe off my pancake makeup.
Actually, I do know how—I stuffed tissues up my nose like a prizefighter and covered my face with a scarf, so I wouldn’t scare the neighborhood kids.
When I told the clerk I needed a passport photo taken, I thought they would take me in a little room. Instead, he just came out from behind the front counter with a bulky old digital camera, and had me stand against the wall of pens and pencils for sale, facing everyone else in line.
“Here?” I asked.
“Yeah, oh wait—” He pulled a dingy, white projection screen down from the ceiling behind me to serve as backdrop. “Ready?”
I gave a final sniffle before closing my mouth and trying to think neutral-yet-smoldering thoughts.
Mona Lisa Blue Steel.
One second later: “Okay,” he said.
“That’s it?”
He nodded and showed me the back of the digital camera, where I saw a brief flash of my tiny image. “Good?”
It wasn’t the best photo of me, but it wasn’t the worst. No one is ever going to look at an ID photo and be wowed. If it gets me across the border, that’s good enough. I just wanted to blow my nose.
“It’ll do.”
I waited at the counter while he went to print two copies of the standard-issue two-inch-square photos.
The clerk reappeared. “That’ll be twenty-four dollars.”
“For two little photos?” Finally, it was my turn to shoot the look: “Really?”
iPhonatic
Lisa
William Wordsworth said the world is too much with us.
I bet he was talking about his smartphone.
Because I have an iPhone and I’m iObsessed.
In the past, I never approved of Those People Who Are Always Looking at Their Phones, but now I have become one of Those People Who Are Always Looking at Their Phones, which is another lesson: Judge not, lest ye be caught looking at your phone.
And what am I looking at on my phone? Not an app, or a game, but social media. Which is a euphemism, because if you’re spending all of your time looking at social media, you’re the most antisocial person in the tristate area.
And which social media am I looking at?
You would think it’s Facebook, but it’s not, if only because of the laws of Facebook. I have an author page on Facebook, on which I can post, read comments, and reply to them, but I don’t get a regular feed, which might be a blessing in disguise.
Because every time I look at Facebook, everybody is smarter, better-looking, and more remarried than I am.
Facebook can be a Depression Machine.
The social media I’m looking at on my phone, almost all the time, is Twitter.
Somebody said that Facebook is the place where you lie to your friends, and Twitter is the place where you tell the truth to strangers.
Word.
But not many of them.
If you’re unfamiliar with Twitter, it’s a running feed of short comments, the notorious 140 characters that can make news, offer compelling articles, or make you laugh.
And it can also misinform, enrage, and make you cry.
It can bring people together when a celebrity dies, or it can pull them apart, like when they stand up for something they believe in that others disagree with.
Not a hypothetical.
Last summer, I tweeted at Golf Digest Magazine because it had tweeted a photo of a golfer hitting a ball into the ocean. It struck me as a terrible thing for a publication to sanction, given the amount of trash already in our seas, which kills marine life. So I tweeted as much, politely—and in an amazing turn of events, the golfer in the photo was an up-and-coming professional who went on to make a hole-in-one the very next day, in a major tournament.
Which would be my luck.
Because the golfer’s fan base exploded in just one day, and every single fan saw my tweet and tweeted back at me, ignoring my point about the environment and calling me names, which for women always begin with B, C, and W.
Of course, they’re wrong.
Anybody who knows me will tell you that I am a B and a C, but totally not a W.
You might be guessing that this incident cured me of my Twitter addiction, but you would be wrong.
If anything, it made me stronger.
B stands for Bulletproof.
C stands for Confident, Capable, and Cute.
Twitter is a free way for geniuses and knuckleheads alike to express themselves, a constantly refreshing comments section, for good or ill.
Which is a recipe for complete and total addiction, if you’re me.
And if you’re a lot of other people, too, especially in election season. Candidates and their followers are tweeting like crazy, and as I’ve already confessed, I’m the Woman in the Philadelphia Suburbs who is obsessed with the election.
So I’m on Twitter.
Fairly constantly.
The irony is that as addictive as Twitter is, no other company wants to buy it. Disney, Google, and Salesforce decided not to make a bid on it, which I don’t understand.
I would buy Twitter in a minute.
Except that it cost $10 billion.
And all of my money is invested in a garden room.
Home Is Where the Bra Comes Off, Part 2
Lisa
Daughter Francesca once said, Home is where the bra comes off.
I have never been prouder of my daughter.
Those of you who read me regularly know that I have been hating bras forever. And those of you who see me regularly know that I put my money where my mouth is.
In other words, Mommy is running around free!
Normally this isn’t a problem because I never leave the house, and now that cold weather is here, even better. Because I wear so much fleece that Francesca calls my outfits “teddy-bear clothes.”
Maybe I’m not that proud of her.
In any event, when you’re wearing teddy-bear clothes, nobody can tell whether you have a bra on, especially if you’re middle-aged, if you follow.
And generally, a braless middle-aged woman is not being followed.