You're so Vain! I bet you think this blog is about you!

I took some passport photos this week. The photographer gleefully exclaimed when she took her one and only shot, "Now that's a great mug shot!" I couldn't bring myself to ask her to take it over again since she was so impressed with her skills, but I thought I looked like an overweight seven year old and my hair stuck out on one side. I paid and collected these four small little squares of my unattractive self and called my sister to find out where else I could go to take another set. She called me vain and said to use the ones I had. Gasp! I'm not vain!

Wait a minute, have I travelled the shift from self conscious into self obsessed? In a time where we no longer have to rely on a film roll of 36 to capture our 3 week vacation, we are all slowly accepting and applauding blatant acts of narcissism. Are we too vain?

Think about all the selfies. How many shots do you delete before you settle on one? How many filters do you skip through? Why are you even taking a picture of your face in the first place! (especially if the caption is some long quoted Bible verse or a comment about how much fun you're having in a place that your big head is blocking out anyway.) How many times have you handed over your iPhone to a stranger and asked them to get a pic of your crew as you have dinner, then hold a pose for a full minute so he can capture multiple shots for you to choose the best 4 to make a collage? How many mornings after a big party do you rush to check out triniscene.com to make sure you looked hot in that picture they got of you? How many of us have photo-editing apps on our phones or have mastered Photoshop, solely for the purpose of blurring imperfections and whitening our teeth in an image?

In a world where we measure our worth with Likes, get professional makeup to go out to dinner or a club, where it's amusing to use #youcantsitwithus, where we have daily essays as our Facebook status bashing other people, where we can't workout without announcing it on social media,with an accompanying photo of our sucked in stomachs and headsets plugged into our ears, where we buy Monday wear and personal photo-shoots and can never wear an outfit again because there's a picture on Facebook from 6 months ago when we wore it before; are we too vain? Is our ostentation a sign that we are proud and happy, or a cry for attention and for people to Like us? (pun intended)

Funny, right? We have some serious issues.

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