Things I Learned Purging Photos

Today I received my new MacBook in the mail, so before I even THINK of syncing my devices together, I thought it prudent to go through purging all the photos I had collected on my iPad over the last couple of years. I knew it was going to be uncomfortable, but… man, I date a lot of guys and save a lot of stupid pictures. Apparently I can add “screen shots of unknown context” and “hot girls with really short hair” to my list of favorite hoarding items. Anyway, there are some general concepts that seemed recurring during my Embarrassing Photo Hunt, and some of them felt weirdly poignant. Here are some things I learned while cleaning out my photo albums….

Do Not Flip the Bird to the Camera. It might turn out a great photo, and then you will find yourself having to decide if sharing a great picture of yourself is worth looking like a total A-hole.

Take Time to Enjoy Being Single. When you inevitably delete every photo with an ex in it, you might find entire events and even YEARS of your life disappearing after the breakup.

Take Lots of Pictures of Pets. Nobody will thumb-up your glamour selfies and sappy Instagrams with above-mentioned exes, but they will certainly appreciate a dog in a chair. Also, you will greatly value these pictures much longer than all those exes and selfies you’re deleting in shame.

Screenshots Are a Great Placebo. “I will totally remember this by taking a picture of how it looks on a computer screen.” *three years later* “Why do I have a photo of the bottom right quadrant of a Skype conversation?” *delete* SO much brain-memory space saved!

Delete Haircut Inspiration after the Appointment. Seriously, you look like a serial killer stalking ginger women with rockin’ sidecuts.

The Best “Sexy” Photos are Ones Where You Don’t Know if They’re You or Not. At least you won’t be incriminated in this way if you ever run for office.

There Is Such a Thing as Too Much Filter. When editing a photo, it’s not a bad practice to save progressively altered versions and give it some time before going back and picking one to send out into cyberspace. Of course, this still means more photos to clean up later. This process just reinforces lessons in restraint.

No Filter Will Replace Eyeliner. The joke about black eyeliner being “hotness in stick form” comes from a very real place. You can bump up the contrast all you want, your little squirrel eyes will be just as disappeared.

Your Pictures Can Outlive a Phase. And You. Make sure the face you are plastering all over Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram is the face that you want to have looked up well after you can’t be looked up, and also is the best representation of that time you wore your hair that way for the Skrillex show.

Topless Young Christopher Walken Completes any Photo Collection.

I Believe In Jebus

“Flanders, how do you stay so happy—and don’t say Jesus!”

- Homer Simpson in "I Won't be Home for Christmas"

This last year has been a fragile one for me. All events have been objectively good, but whether inflicted by medication or buried emotional trauma, it has been a difficult one. There was a point at which some friends and I were discussing our faith, or for some of us, what was left of it.

"Is that supposed to be enough? Just that Jesus came back is really supposed to be sufficient to put up with life?" I realize how much some of us were sounding like ungrateful children. Perhaps we are.

Months later, and only a few days ago, I started crying uncontrollably during the singing of "Because He Lives". Of course, my tears dried up during that verse that comes out of nowhere gushing about babies, but came back for the chorus and the bit about the victory in dying.

But seriously, if dying is going to be so great, what is there to hold a Christian to the earth? There's a lot of doctrine about propagating the species and sharing the word of The Lord, but spending my life pregnant and then telling my offspring that the life I gave them is just awful until they die doesn't seem appealing to me.

Something I realized just today is that I have been cherishing the words of Dostoyevsky in my heart even more than the things I feel I was taught in church. Specifically:

“I believe like a child that suffering will be healed and made up for, that all the humiliating absurdity of human contradictions will vanish like a pitiful mirage, like the despicable fabrication of the impotent and infinitely small Euclidean mind of man, that in the world's finale, at the moment of eternal harmony, something so precious will come to pass that it will suffice for all hearts, for the comforting of all resentments, for the atonement of all the crimes of humanity, for all the blood that they've shed; that it will make it not only possible to forgive but to justify all that has happened.”

There are even more powerful declarations of hope and victory given by Jesus himself, but it is hard for me to access those sometimes. It's hard for me to remember the words of hope from a being who so many use as a weapon against those they choose to hate. To too many, it seems like Jesus came not to save the world, but to condemn it. Because my pastor has yet to promise hell to anybody in any of his sermons, I bet there are many who would condemn him to it. Why WOULD a sinner want to hear from another sinner how somebody else's god will destroy their very soul (unless, of course, they unconditionally abandon all life experience to share all the beliefs of the messenger in this scenario)?

Children ask their parents if a certain person is going to hell, and the parents feel authorized to answer "yes" or "no" (for family members it's "yes"; celebrities, "no"). I knew the story of the sisters who raped their drunk father in the Old Testament before I knew male and female had different genitals, or the word "genitals", or the concept that gender was tied to anything other than hair length. [Sidebar: that version of myself would be shocked at my hair now; would I think I had gotten a sex change?] It feels like more than anything, "The Church" wanted to push me out, to keep membership only to those with the greatest sense of entitlement.

I believe in the cleansing power of Jesus. Not because of anything "The Church" ever did for me, but because of something I feel inside myself. I came back to church not because of anything anybody in "The Church" did, but because that feeling inside me knew it was time. And I think that feeling is Jesus, or God, or whatever you choose to call it. I've made it this far, and it would be an insult to the misery I survived in my youth to give up any time after. So yes, that is sufficient.