#selfie

Two days after Christmas, my sister-in-law got into a car accident and as a result I had to join Instagram.

I never really felt like Instagram was for me. I'm not a hipster, for one (I loathe hipsters), and also I've never been struck by the overwhelming compulsion to photograph my food. In addition, I've always felt like people who know me remember what my face looks like without me posting a new picture of it every single day. So what would be the point of Instagram?

But I went shopping with my aunt and cousins after Christmas. I had never been shopping with my aunt and cousins before. I don’t know that, strictly speaking, I was invited. My sister-in-law was invited, and she invited me, and then someone hit her car on the freeway and it was just me and my aunt and cousins. 

It probably sounds a little cold and unfeeling that we shopped anyway, but my sister-in-law was fine, I swear. On the other hand, I was now shopping with three people I'd never before shopped with. I wasn’t sure how I felt about this, because I strongly suspected that I wasn’t interested in any of the stores they wanted to go to, but I had already driven 7 miles to the mall and I was in need of a snazzy dress.

I'd never shopped for a snazzy dress before. My clothes shopping excursions are rarely so specific. Perhaps they ought to be; I tend to wander the mall for hours because I need things like “shirts” and “pants" or, worst of all, "shoes." It's awful. Adjectives, particularly those akin to snazzy, don't often come up. When I am clothes shopping, I ask myself three questions about a garment:
1)      Can I put this in the washing machine?
2)      Am I comfortable?
3)      If a man sees me in this, will he want to “hit that”?

Snazziness has never factored in. But I was planning on attending a New Year’s Eve dance for which the dress code was "snazzy." I thought that perhaps my family and I could unite in the snazzy-dress cause, and unite we did. If we hadn’t been on the lookout for snazziness, we never would have gone into a store called Windsor.

If I were a 15-year-old with a spray tan, low morals, daddy issues, and 2% body fat, I would shop at Windsor. Everything there is glittery or ridiculous or both. I knew as soon as we went in that I wasn’t going to find a dress there, mostly because I am apparently three times the size of the average Windsor shopper. I found a sparkly skirt that would probably have fit on my leg. I considered buying two, one for each thigh, and then getting some sort of tunic to cover my backside, but in the end my thighs looked a little too big, so I gave up.

I looked around at some other things and found a bunch of shirts with classy, sophisticated phrases on them like “Hey Haters” and “YOLO.” But my favorite, my absolute favorite, said “#SELFIE.” I took a picture of it with my phone, because the moment needed documentation. Something about this shirt really spoke to me on a primal level, and by "primal level" I mean "my propensity to be giddily delighted by the ridiculous." But in the absence of anything snazzy that would actually cover the parts of me that I am required to cover by law, we left the store.

I did not find a snazzy dress that day, and eventually my family and I parted ways. As we said goodbye, I made a joke about the selfie shirt, and my cousin Katy said I should have tried it on and taken a selfie in it. Why hadn’t I thought of that? Probably because my phone was a Droid 2, which had just celebrated its third birthday by requiring five battery charges a day instead of four. Any time I turned on the screen, I lost 20% of the battery life. Taking a selfie would drain the battery.

I went back to Windsor and took the Selfie shirt to the fitting room. I was surprised at how much I liked it. I took a selfie – I took about 15 selfies, actually (taking my phone to 5% battery life), and in every single one I’m smiling like the joker, showing all 900 of my teeth.

If I hadn’t been smiling and laughing like a comic book villain, I might have had a clearer head. But I was, and I didn’t, and I decided I needed the selfie shirt in my life.

So I bought it. I feel certain that my sister-in-law could have prevented this; she would have gently reminded me that I am thirty years old and that most people don't understand my sense of humor. She could have stopped me from spending that 15 bucks. But she wasn't there, and so I bought it. I took it up to the register and the salesgirl asked if I’d found everything okay and all I could do was laugh, which probably only added to my resemblance to the Joker. (At one point I stopped laughing long enough to blurt out, “I’m thirty!”)

The only thing that remained was to share this moment with my nearest and dearest. I considered Facebook, but as a general rule the only selfies I post on Facebook include puppets from work. I had no choice - I had to join Instagram.

I did manage to find a snazzy dress later, and my friends and I were photographed at the dance, and I thought, people should see this, and so I put it on Instagram, with the hashtag "snazzy dress." It got worse - on Saturday I took a picture of some fettuccini.

But don't you worry about me. I'm not turning into one of those people, I swear. I'm no hipster. Remember, I hated Instagram before it was cool.