self-portraits

they say it's better to find a boyfriend who loves photograph, so all you do is to smile, and he will take charge of the photo-taking.

my mom is into photography. she took loads of photos of my dad, and when we were little. i guess she thinks it helps her remember moments in life. i am glad that she likes taking photos, her habit has become stacks of photo albums at home. some of the memories long lost in my mind, she has helped to keep record of.

but now i am old and the age is digital. now when we take photographs they are seldom candid, instead they are staged, and we pose. standard face, standard smile. most of my photographs are simply uncool.

luckily i have a little sister, who is generous enough to help me take photos sometimes, (considering how troublesome i can be when it comes to photo-taking, i am never quite satisfied with how i look...) when i feel pretty enough to want to be remembered, or when i want a photo sent to my boyfriend. but most of the time i take my own photos, in my own room.

it may sound a bit pathetic. but my boyfriend is not into photography, and the camera doesn't really love me. it is just extremely difficult to get a photo of a good scenery with me looking good in it. occasionally my mom takes photos of me with her phone camera, but most of the time it is just me and my own existence. no one is bothered enough to capture anything. maybe it's the same with everyone else.

sometimes i am afraid that one day i may wake up to be 70, and i don't have any photos of the young me looking pretty. it will feel so lonely when my memories become my only and very own private access to my past. 

but i am not the only one to do these self-portraits. andy warhol did it, van gogh did, too, and durer was a big fan of it. even when it is not about depicting how the artist looks like, it is still about expressing how the artist feels like. that's why i am here blogging, and when i am not here i am still writing, sometimes a poem, sometimes a letter, sometimes a novella, and sometimes whatever. it may be because of self-love, but it is not entirely that i think, it is also about getting a grip of my own existence. 

otherwise life will pass by without much left. since i was little i have been afraid of how fast life passes lives by. it is almost too fast for us to live.