California dreamin', Part 5
My sister changed my Facebook profile picture today because, she said, it was “creepy.”
Needless to say, I was unappreciative. I suppose it was a little creepy — I had pointed the camera at the bathroom mirror, my hair was huge, and I rotated the image to mess with people — but I had no intention of ever changing it. I added it (according to my profile) on June 25, 2007, and I wanted to think it was one of the oldest, unchanged profile pictures on the entire social network. (I highly doubt it was.) While others changed their picture ad nauseam, I wanted mine to be a kind of anti-image statement. Take that, Facebook! (Says the man who always talks about permanently deleting his profile but never does.)
Anyway, The Loud Sister is still keeping tabs of an ex-boyfriend via his wife’s profile. (My sister friended her using my profile. I have never met the woman and probably never will.) Why did she change my picture, despite the fact it has been “creepy” for over five years? She was afraid her ex’s wife would unfriend me because of it. So she uploaded a picture of me at the Rogue Ales Public House in San Francisco.
“It’s got beer in it!” she said after she logged into my profile to show me. My mom took it on our trip to NorCal in 2009. It featured a date stamp, like all my mom’s pictures do. I hate date stamps.
I suppose it was a decent enough picture of me, but I would have never chosen it. So I changed it to the above pic, though I flipped it vertically to mess with people.
It has been over a year since I last wrote in the “California dreamin’” series. There really is nothing more for me to say but I have wanted to post the picture.
I took it on one of my final evenings in California, at the 17th Street beach in Huntington Beach. I always liked 17th Street because there were fewer people there; it was about a half-mile north of the pier and Main Street, the main tourist attractions. I sometimes went there in the evening to watch the sun set, and at night to sit at the edge of the ocean, just beyond the reach of the tide, to watch and listen as the waves crashed one after another. It was cooler there and the wind blew ashore. It was the perfect place to meditate and think, to relax and relieve stress. It was my last time there in the evening and I took my digital camera. I placed it on the deck of a lifeguard tower, set the timer, and sat down on the mound of sand just ahead of the tower (placed there so the guard did not have to jump as far if he were rushing to an emergency). I wanted to take a picture of myself looking out across the ocean. I waited and waited and still did not hear the “snap” of the camera. So I stood and turned, just as the shutter opened to absorb the dim evening light. I was captured by a long exposure, blurred by my own motion.
“You can’t even see yourself!” my sister yelled downstairs to me.
