First off, I'll begin by saying that this is the gayest photo of me ever taken. It's even gayer when you realize that I took it myself. And even worse is that I used a bunch of Photoshop techniques to achieve the near-impossible: making myself even prettier than I actually am.

I've been thinking a lot about photography lately; namely digital photography, and how it has changed the way we capture memories. A commonly made point about digital photography is that we so rarely have any bad photos anymore. We see our photos immediately after they are taken. We delete the bad ones and keep reshooting until we get it right, even if we have to take 500 pictures to do it.

I recently helped a friend with her Myspace pictures, and took what I thought was just a few shots. When I started transferring them into my laptop, it informed me that I was loading 63 pictures.

In the old days, you'd take 24 pictures on a roll of expensive film. Then, you'd take it to Walgreens or whatever, lay down even more money, and you'd get back 19 bad pictures and maybe five good ones. But you wouldn't throw the bad ones out, because you paid so much money for them and it's insulting and awful to see pictures of your loved ones in the garbage with the coffee grounds and moldy leftovers. So you hung onto them.

What these bad photos did, however, was hold your memories. Recently, I was looking at some old digital photos of mine that I loaded onto my hard drive and forgot about. I probably have even stricter standards than most, because when I take pictures, they don't just have to be good, they have to be blogworthy, in other words, pertinent to something I want to write about.

Anyway, I was looking at these photos, none of which were either blogworthy or good, and it was incredible. I remembered all of these things I'd forgotten. Days that were really fun, even though nothing noteworthy happened. It was the day you wore that one shirt. Or the time we ate at Sammy's Pizza. Or the night we drank that fantastic rum that we can't remember the name of.

Which brings me to my point. Are we purposely skewing our memories to be even more untrue than they would otherwise be? Are we rewriting our stories as we go along? Because really, while I do want to remember the night when Bone Appetit played in the Keep Aways' basement, I don't really need any help with that. I do, however, need help remembering the night we made nachos and watched King of the Hill, because that is the stuff that life is made of.

Only when I remember it, I am glowing and poreless. And, apparently, metrosexual.

UPDATE: I was on the phone with a friend of mine when I posted this. I told her that I just posted, then there was a pause, and then a shriek of horror. So yes, I know how bad it is. Never say I don't sacrifice myself for art.