Share your favorite photo of yourself. Describe why you love it.

Why would anyone want to look at pictures of me? I believe that photographs steal your soul (not really, but maybe they do). Anyway, I’m not photogenic.

My best friend is of Norwegian descent; I’m of Finnish stock. We look more like sisters than my real sister and I do. She takes great pictures; I do not. I am so pale that I look like a ghost. All those pictures of glowing, white phantasms haunting old battlefields and houses that you see on the internet? Those aren’t ghosts; they’re just pictures of Finnish people.

I never smile in pictures because I know how they will turn out. My picture smiles always look fake anyway. It’s evident that I’m not happy about having my picture taken, so why try to fake it by plastering a stupid grin on my face? “Oh, here’s a picture of that photogenic Norwegian girl and her pale friend. Wait, is that a ghost? It’s smiling at us! Ewwww, creepy!! Take it away!”

Most of the pictures of me that I can tolerate aren’t really pictures of me in the traditional sense. They’re not posed or planned out in advance. They are spontaneous pictures that someone happened to snap while I wasn’t paying attention.

The one I posted is like that. It’s a picture I snapped myself when I wasn’t paying attention. I had just gotten my shiny, new MacBook Pro and I discovered that it has a webcam. Oh, the horror! I can’t imagine anything worse than chatting with people via webcam. No, thank you. To be sure that I never accidentally used said webcam, I was trying to turn it off permanently. In fact, I thought about covering it with something just so that it couldn’t ever be used.

Instead of disabling the webcam, I accidentally snapped a picture of myself, too close and out of frame. I came to like this picture since you can’t really see anything besides a wall of pink hair and one eyeball. There is no fake smile, and even though I do look in dire need of a haircut and incredibly pale, it’s about as real as it gets. If you look off to the right of the eyeball, you can just about make out the ghost.