School Pictures

I have this weird phobia about getting my picture taken.  I'm not going to get into it too much because it's difficult to explain and I'm tired.  Let's just say I don't like being in pictures.  I hate posing for them, I hate seeing myself in them.  All the time.  Even my own mother and close friends have admitted I am not photogenic.  "Um, yeah... you look better than this in real life..." they mutter.  I don't know what it is about me, every physical flaw (and there are a lot) seem to be magnified a hundred fold in pictures.  Or maybe I really do look like that.  But anyway.

I'm not sure when I started developing this phobia but I do recall when I was 10 or 11 I told my mother I didn't see the point to having these awful school portraits taken of me year after year.  I told her she could save money by not ordering them, and I wouldn't have to sit and pose for them.  I could just tell the photographer when he waved to me standing on line that it was my turn, "No thanks.  My parents aren't going to buy your pictures so I'm just going to go stand over there."  My mother's response was, "I need them to give the police if you get kidnapped."

After that, until I got to high school, year after year I dutifully sat on the stool and smiled a feeble smile, picturing the picture that was being taken at that moment in newspapers and fliers stuck to lamp posts.  "Have you seen this girl?" it would say.  I pictured the interior of the van that would whisk me away to some horrible dank location.  I imagined it rusty and cold and unlined.  I wondered what it felt like to be trapped inside the trunk of a car.  I once saw on an episode of Charlie's Angels where a clever woman was able to push through to the back seat after being thrown into a trunk.  I wondered if I could do that.  I wondered if they would duct tape my mouth, or if they would use a strip of cloth.  Would I be able to find a way to cut through the rope while the baddies were eating dinner?  All these scenarios of what I knew kidnapping to be from watching tv ran through my head as the photographer peered through his camera and told me to smile.

It is with this in mind that I snapped these photos of my baby cucumbers this morning.  We noticed that now the culprit is stealing them younger and younger, catching on to the fact that my mother is snipping them before they get a chance to fully mature and, of course, be stolen.  (This is another reason I don't buy my neighbor's "critter" explanation - btw the cukes in the next plot are doing just fine so don't give me that.)  "Have you seen these cucumbers?" is not something I can ask after the asshole steals them.  It really, really sucks that we have such lovely promising things in my tiny plot and after all that hard work we (my mother) put into it, some fucking asshole has to take them.