The brand manager at my new job recently asked if I could provide her with a current headshot to include on our company intranet. Because I work in very corporatey settings doing very corporatey things, one might reasonably expect me to have this sort of thing at the ready. Unfortunately, before quitting my last job, I forgot to send myself a copy of the headshot that I simply kept on file there.
I don’t particularly fancy having my picture taken, so I’m not inclined to run out and get a new headshot. I’m not picking on myself, as I’m generally fine with my looks in real life, but let’s just say that if Severus Snape and Laura Dern had a baby, it would grow up to look like photo-me.
If you believe our phones are always listening to us, you will not be surprised that I soon after received an ad in my social feed for remarkably authentic AI-generated headshots. The samples sincerely looked like nice headshots generated as believable composites of normal people’s photos. After paying a nominal fee, I submitted six photos of my face from various snapshots I have on file, and just over an hour later, I I was absolutely delighted to see the results. This is for sure the most entertaining $5 I’ve spent in ages:
Look at the gourd on this young lady. She must be really smart.This skirt is ideal for a 51-year-old woman because it takes me right from the board room to the junior high basketball game, where I am still captain of the cheer squad.No lies detected. This is exactly how I look in real life and is also the exact way I stand when I want my ideas to be taken seriously in a strategy session at work.I’m impressed AI could extrapolate from six candid snapshots of only my face that I lost my left leg in a tragic farming accident.Nothing says professional like keeping a whole other woman inside my pants to help me check for chin hairs. Also, I REALLY LIKE BUTTONHOLES.Backscratch, anyone?
In the interest of full disclosure, I confess I’ve witheld the few AI photos I received where, instead of missing a limb or having seven-fingered hands that look like McDonald’s French Toast sticks, I merely looked too young. And by “too young,” I mean too young for a headshot of a woman who has 30 years of work experience and the scowl-wrinkles to prove it. While I got a thorough kick out of what appears to have been the Wish version of AI photography, I’m absolutely positive–and strangely relieved–I’m still going to need a real-life photographer in the end. (Go, team human beings!)
I work in an office building in a revitalized downtown. The streets surrounding it are lined with retro neon signs, quirky shops, and tempting cafes, clubs, bars, and theaters. There’s even a converted funeral parlour that serves as a de facto speakeasy near where I park. I’ve been on this job for several months, often telling myself as I walk from car to office or from office to car that I ought to do more midday breaks to really explore, or better yet, stay after work to meet my friends or husband at any of the nighttime haunts: a jazz club, a narrow dive that makes the best Old Fashioneds, an alleyway oyster bar that I imagine the French painter Toulouse-Lautrec would have wanted to paint were he to see it from the street corner at night: dimly lit with dressed up people, some of them happy, eating and drinking inside.
Do I ever do it, though? I don’t.
I have a friend who told me after my first marriage ended that he was going to teach me how to be married to myself. My time, my travels, my hobbies, my home, and my life were to be deliciously mine, all mine, and I could fill the blank canvas however I wanted. I didn’t take him up on that offer, as I do like going through life with a partner, but I’m not sure the offer expired or required me to stay single. Why is it so hard for some of us to just spoil ourselves this way by choice? Why are the life-enriching “promises” we make to ourselves often the easiest to break?
Yesterday as I walked to the parking garage at dusk, I noticed the entrance to the garage stairwell and was reminded that I also keep breaking my promises to myself around my health. Why would a perfectly able-bodied woman of my age not just take the stairs? Four flights of stairs could do a person good.
So, I took the stairs.
As I rounded the switchback to the third level, I was rewarded with a soothing view of butter-pat windows reflecting the setting sun. Beneath them: brightly painted murals all along a nearby street I never walk, sandwiching one grayscale mural of a legendary and much-loved singer born and raised here. She sang the first song on our wedding processional playlist (and you might recognize her if you look closely!).
This. This!
It might not look like much to others, but for me, it was soul-lifting and an enticing reminder to pay attention to a world that invites me to treat myself. Look! Whenever we so choose, we can decide to be in so much more of the painting rather than just walking past it with our head in our work, our phones, our worries.
I’ll be the first to admit: America’s post-pandemic economy and post-pandemic societal norms are slowly robbing me of the will to live. Everything costs too much. Everyone’s tired of each other’s shit. People honk their horns and flip birds at each other over the slightest perceived transgression. (I confess I almost daily want to ramrod someone with my own vehicle.) Boundaries are subjective and unclear and therefore disrespected and overruled on a near-daily basis. Nothing is sacred, and yet somehow everything is sacred, and how dare you not know the difference. Microagressions abound, and you don’t even have to mean to hurt someone to be taken to the mat and given a dressing down best reserved for people who wipe boogers on things. Your bedroom is your office, the workday has faux bookends, and cc fields on emails are where wars are waged. It’s very confusing. Oh, and everything’s made in China and will stop working the second you brush your arm against it. Perhaps most concerning of all: Some lady on social media with a wad of gum wedged in her molars seems hellbent on selling me crotch deodorant. (Hi, Lume! I’m accepting free samples!)
But I know this to be true: Whatever we humans train our attention on will appear larger than it is. People who rescue dogs are forever stumbling across strays. People who collect heart-shaped rocks find them every time they look down on a hike. If you love owls or pink sunrises, model trains or vintage cars, big noses or small ears–whatever floats your boat–I guarantee that you see these all over the place and far more often than other people do. By that same reasoning, when you look for problems, you find them. This blog is about seeking more pink sunrises and fewer wrinkles. On that note…
My son finished up junior high this week, and the school parent-teacher organization sold custom graduation yard signs as a way to raise funds while honoring the occasion. I bought one and placed it in the front yard. It just says, “Congratulations, Beckett! Class of 2023 [School Name] Junior High School!” Nothing fancy.
Mind you, in our new neighborhood, people communicate only through the same three barking dogs that wake us all up in unison each day. They don’t actually know each other or seem particularly interested in changing that. So I had no delusions anyone other than my son was going to read or care about the sign. But then an envelope showed up the day after I posted the sign. It was wedged in our front door, and this was what was inside:
How sweet was this? How thoughtful and kind? How generous? It made such a big impact on all of us and was a very bright spot in a seemingly endless string of stressors in our lives. In response, my husband picked up a nice card in the grocery store. My son wrote inside, “It’s good to know that there are people like you in the world.” I walked with him to the address listed in the card–several streets away from us, as it turned out–and we knocked on the door, hoping to meet these neighbors in person. They weren’t home, so we left the card in their own front door and walked home together holding hands, him chattering away in his cracking voice about one day traveling to Norway, plans to audition for jazz band, how exclamation points are announced in some African languages, the reason he doesn’t want a cell phone, and a zillion other things that I wouldn’t have otherwise heard had we not set out on that walk to meet the nice strangers. Through one single act of kindness, they created such joy!
If you are having a seemingly endless string of stressors or wanting to ramrod strangers with your car, I highly recommend giving yourself a homework assignment to notice something good each day. Fewer wrinkles, more sunrises. It’s contagious, and it helps.
The Second Magpie 