Tuesday, October 04, 2005

another picture-perfect tale

when i needed to have my physician's license renewed a few months ago, i went completely unprepared and didn't know that i had to be in a collared shirt for the picture.

(by the way, someone needs to explain this to me: what is the significance of the collar? does it contribute to the photogenic potential of a person? what is being ID-ed anyway? my face or my clavicle area? anyway ...)

so i called my mother – her office was a short drive away – and asked if she had an extra collared shirt somewhere in her office. none, she said, but promised to ask her secretary, who was just about to go to work. a brilliant idea, i thought.

when i got to my mother's office, she was on the phone with her secretary, giving her explicit instructions to bring a selection of her "biggest collared shirts" – which prompted me to ask:

"ma ... isn't she bigger than me?"

"no," the woman-who-bore-me said, "she's a small girl."

so we waited a bit for the secretary's grand entrance. when she arrived, my first thought was, "i'm not bigger than her!"

and the secretary's first words were: "you're not bigger than me!"

and, of course, the more pressing question here is:

"just how big does my mother think i am!?"

i mean, i've accepted long ago that my family's genetic code doesn't have the gene that allows a human to compliment other humans, but this is RIDICULOUS.

--------------------

fast forward to a couple of days ago. i brought out the picture-from-the-pits-of-picture-hell at dinner and my family passed it around to "appreciate" it one more time.

when it was my mother's turn, she looked at the pic, momentarily scrunched up her face to repress a snicker, and passed it back to me, saying, "it's not bad."

my sister's theory was that mother was trying to make up for the whole bring-your-biggest-shirts incident, but who knows? maybe my license pic is one that only a mother could love or, at the very least, gaze at without convulsing.

No comments: