~~okieOLIO~~

i don’t know if it’s amusing, impressive, or scary how easy it is to do a facelift of your personal history. our brains are capable of a makeover so effective that we forget the “before” pictures ever existed and move forward in life with a new reality. i’m not referring to coping with trauma. i’m talking about the details of an event or period of time that we wish were just a little bit different. so often those details get airbrushed in our minds, just enough to take the edge off the awkward, insecure, and embarrassing memories. and then there’s the material evidence. sometimes snapshots of these moments facilitate the fib (“look how happy i am smiling at that awful party.”) and sometimes the photos belie the distorted recollection (“wow, i was a bit heavier than i remembered.”)

for the past few weeks i’ve been scanning a lot of my old photos into flickr, to preserve them before they fade or get lost, but also because i enjoy browsing and organizing my pictures on the computer. (life is just too good not to enjoy the high points again and again.) it seems incomprehensible now, but i don’t have to go back many years to arrive at my pre-digital, 35mm photos. (other than a photography course in college, my photographs processed from film are not the admirably artistic kind – we’re talking disposables and point-and shoot models here.)

in some aspects the photos are an annoyingly accurate record-keeper. there’s no denying the bad perm, buck teeth, or gigantic glasses – photoshop is no help there. but other times photographs are a misleading illusion. and i don’t just mean a funny camera angle. i’m talking about the posed moments created especially for the benefit of the camera – a shiny façade glossed on top of the truth. either way, the pictures always bring a jolting rush of emotion. as i viewed each print, i laughed, i gasped, i awwwed, i sighed, i cringed. i felt happy, sad, excited, irritated, nostalgic, nervous, and loved. i felt whatever i had been feeling at the moment the photo was snapped.

for the most part, i love that emotive response to reliving freeze frames from the past – i’ve lived a full, charmed, ambrosial 30 years. but occasionally the scenes roused old insecurities that have lain dormant for a long time. i was instantly transformed from a confident, successful adult into a gawky junior high kid again. this phenomenon of being confronted with buried sentiments reminded me of a question recently posed by my friend laura: to reconnect or not to reconnect? she pondered the emotional effects of renewing lost social ties online, and posited that perhaps we’re all just a little too available. i think i’ve found a response to the examination of why social media can make grown adults regress back to teenagers.

nearly a year and a half ago there was an article in the new york times titled brave new world of digital intimacy. (you may have to create a free account with NYT to view the entire piece.) in the article, social psychologists compared the advent of incessant online contact to living in a small town where everyone knows your business. now that we never lose touch with old friends, we are always trapped in that community we grew up in.

Psychologists and sociologists spent years wondering how humanity would adjust to the anonymity of life in the city…a world of lonely people ripped from their social ties. We now have precisely the opposite problem.

this “ambient awareness,” where every move is observed and shared, is reminiscent of high school. when you’re constantly aware of your friends’ activities, you tend to compare and measure every accomplishment, good fortune, and exciting event against your own. and with everyone trying mightily to paint a beautiful, exotic, auspicious existence to the online world, it’s easy to feel inadequate.

fortunately, past teenage anxiety doesn’t stay long enough to even shake off the dust, and i welcome the vast majority of memories and reconnections. but it’s still strange to me how a stroll down memory lane can be as mood altering as the original experience.

’tis the season, it seems. the time of year that brings close encounters with many things that are regrettably scarce throughout the rest of the year: heightened faith & hope, special times with family & friends, cheerful spirits, generous giving, grateful hearts…and stamps. the holiday season brings with it an influx of snail mail, or as i like to call it, real mail. when the mountains of holiday cards begin to fill the mailbox, i used to feel  a peculiar sensation of  excitement mixed with dread. while i’m eager to check the mail, tear into the envelopes, and display the colorful greetings, i always felt the pressure to reciprocate with a standout card worthy of display in someone else’s home. even when the gesture is genuine, getting Christmas cards mailed can become just another deadline on the crowded holiday calendar. so to keep the season joyful, lee & i have agreed on some Christmas card ground rules:

1. We cannot spend more than X amount of time in creating, addressing, and sending the cards.
2. We cannot spend more than X amount of dollars on the cards and postage.
3. We will not send a standard family portrait with a generic yuletide phrase stamped on the bottom.

(this last rule is simply to keep our own boredom at bay and force some creativity into the mix….some of my favorite cards each year fit the description in #3 perfectly.)

the thing is, i really appreciate when other people go to obvious effort to deliver a unique, creative, or handmade card. i examine the details, read every word, and return to view each again and again. but when it comes to my own family greeting, i’m well aware of my artistic limitations and my tendency toward perfectionism, so boundaries are necessary to prevent an inordinant drain of time or money.

as a result, our card creating process has looked something like this: “do we have any good pics of us from the last year?” “no, of course not. either your eyes are closed or i look  like a monkey or we both are having a REALLY bad hair day.” after which we do a quick photo shoot in the living room or try to creatively manipulate the silly photos we do have into a holiday message. a few online clicks later, we’ve designed something we can pick up locally within the hour and mail that day. and this has worked fairly well for everyone, i think.

but this year i nearly broke all of the rules. because i was away from home from the week before thanksgiving to the second week in december, i realized a bit too late that our Christmas cards would need to be prepared before my return if there was any hope of them arriving at their destinations in time. my only option was to fly solo with the design and use one of the few photos stored on the tiny netbook i had with me on the trip (sorry cooper, you didn’t make the cut this year). i’m going to blame it on the extra free time i had because i was traveling, and perhaps trying to overcompensate for sub-par photo quality, but i found myself spending excessive time creating an expensive card. i eventually came to my senses, but i realized that our rules are definitely beneficial for me.

the regulations above apply to our own cards, to keep sanity in the sending. if you want tips on what make getting cards fun, check out the basic guidelines my friend laura has shared on what makes a quality holiday card. (to give her friends a self-conscious paranoia about their own mailed holiday tidings….i mean, to offer friendly advice )  laura knows her cards. she designs fabulous screen printed any occassion cards, and risks her personal sanity each year to create exquisite handmade Christmas cards for the enjoyment of her friends and family.

our mailing list was greatly reduced this year due to the cramped schedule, so if you didn’t receive a card in the mail (not many did), consider yourself officially Christmas carded! MERRY CHRISTMAS!