Every now and then you encounter something that takes you back to your childhood. Perhaps it's getting overly excited for the upcoming "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles" movie. Maybe it's the rejection you feel - yet again - by your middle school crush when you see him in line at Jamba Juice, and he pretends he has no idea who you are. It may even be caused by hearing the Macarena.
In my case, it's picture day.
This week I was faced with the daunting task of having to take a family portrait for University Lutheran Church's upcoming pictorial directory. Despite the fact that my family and I are nearly quarter-century congregation members, we can't seem to get our act together to take a secular picture at Sears, and so our growth as a family can only be charted by our two previous directory photos hanging in our house.
In the last version, I was an ASU freshman with normal looking hair, and prior to that, my brother was wearing footed pajamas and being held by my mother.
Since the dissolution of palmwalk.com, most ASU students need no longer worry about having formal pictures taken, but this past Tuesday caused me to revert to a severe amount of elementary-school-style thinking.
Therefore, I spent Monday night carefully crafting an ensemble in keeping with my mother's color-coding request, making sure to lay out everything nicely, so it wouldn't be wrinkly for the next day. This included my favorite kelly green sweater, kelly green headband and Wet 'n Wild kelly green eyeliner. In short, my Tuesday outfit.
I also chose to wear my kelly green Chuck Taylors even though I knew they wouldn't be featured because as Ludacris always says, "our time and our clothes gotta coordinate." And he and I both know I am not one to act the fool.
Perhaps you're wondering why I might care so much about a seemingly insignificant family photo that will only be seen by the handful of church members who remember to pick up the directory after Sunday's worship service.
Especially since most of those people have known me since birth, and no picture they see of me today could be even remotely worse than any picture of me in middle school looking, sadly, my best.
Still, there remains a tacit pressure to make an organized picture-taking event a quality moment in family history -- unlike every other family gathering before I race to find my imaginary adoption papers.
Because of this, it assumes paramount pressure to avoid the utmost mistake of any picture day: the potential of soiling my clothes beforehand. Now that I am a quasi-adult, I didn't think that this would be a real issue.
I no longer encounter the youthful distractions of recess tag games, potential cafeteria food fights and having pig's blood rain down on me after I telekinetically locked the classroom doors.
Sweet goodness, was I wrong.
It turns out that even college students encounter myriad obstacles that could possibly ruin a well-planned, picture-day wardrobe.
For instance, we can slip in the mud created by the recent rain. We can spill our chai lattes down our fronts when we hear a humorous quip about how weird Carrot Top looks. And most importantly, we could fail to avoid the onslaught of excited teammates who dump orange Gatorade on us after winning the big game, all while we scream, "NOOOOO! I have to get my picture taken!"
Luckily, I managed to sidestep these disasters and keep myself relatively unsullied. I even kept from vomiting during the extreme awkwardness of being told to smile as my brother and I were placed in promesque poses.
So in summation, here's my advice to all of you who might encounter a picture-day circumstance in the future.
Make sure you take a non-relative to the dance.
Heather Hull would love to be pictured as a graduate student. Send her your negatives at heather.hull@asu.edu.