RULE #62.1: DON’T HAVE A DOUCHEBAGGY PROFILE PICTURE.
most of the credit for this section goes to JokerJitsu, who articulated it in one of our combination phonecall/IM chats last week. there are seven basic types of profile pictures on facebook. some are acceptable. some are unacceptable. some are acceptable under certain conditions only.
TYPE 1: a picture of your offspring instead of you.
verdict: unacceptable.
millenials, take note and file this away for future reference, but this message is even more important to those a decade ahead of you. generation Y, as you enter your child-bearing years, please take a lesson from the mistakes of my generation, because it appears that my fellow gen-Xers are the major offenders in this category. yes, you procreated… you and 99% of your peers. congratulations on checking that one off your “conforming to social norms” list! while we’re all very impressed that you tricked someone into combining genes with you by promising to love them when you already barely even liked the motherfucker… when they named the goddamned thing facebook, they assumed you’d be smart enough to figure out they meant YOUR face. because seriously, when i’m trying to figure out if you’re my cousin chris jones, my neighbor’s brother chris jones, that meth-cooker chris jones i went to high school with, or some other “your search found more than 500 results” chris jones, a picture of a small creature that is roughly 25% phenotypically like you IS NOT FUCKING HELPING ME.
i offer one very, very narrow window of exception to this otherwise iron-clad rule. i have two friends who just had babies in the last month – TalkyTalky and WireTap. TalkyTalky’s wife, BicycleIrish, changed her picture to a shot of TalkyJunior and his new baby sister, and WireTap changed hers to one of her new baby boy (on the day he was born. and then played a round of scramble. yay for free wi-fi in the delivery room!) when you have a baby, the only thing anyone wants from you is to see the baby, so the offspring-as-profile-pic is non-douchy for a very limited time. within a couple of weeks, WireTap had changed her profile pic to one of her and the baby, beginning a smooth transition back to a picture of only herself. (her emily post has always been impeccable… begging the question, how the hell has she been my friend for the last 17 years?)
TYPE 2: a picture of you and your significant other.
verdict: depends who you ask.
this one actually doesn’t bother me much. i just got on facebook two months ago, and i’ve really enjoyed seeing pictures of people i remember as scabby-kneed little turds looking all hot and grown-up and in love, sometimes with someone i also remember as a goofy-looking little dork. JokerJitsu, on the other hand, refers to it as “a pic of a bitch and the man she has no identity without.” so, use this type of profile pic at your own risk.
TYPE 3: glamour shot.
verdict: douchebo baggins.
seriously. for my college-age friends, i don’t mean your senior picture, or a picture of you at prom. those are fine. you’re dressed up, you’re looking good, your smile is genuine. i’m not making fun of you for those. (since i’ve met virtually all of my college age friends through the fencing club… what i AM making fun of you for is the ass-whupping i handed you last time i fenced you. ha! … … … okay, and just in case one of the really good fencers happens to be reading this post … i kid! you’re awesome. i bow to your skills. oh god please don’t hurt me again.)
i’m talking about some stiffly-posed bullshit that you obviously paid someone a lot of money to do to you. one that you probably have in a “portfolio” that will never get you into so much as a porn movie. (i’m not sayin. i’m just sayin.) you don’t look like a playboy bunny, okay? so posing like one, airbrushing and all, only with your clothes on, is completely douchy.
unless you’re darth vader. in which case it’s awesome.
blame PRM for that one. as he read the above paragraph over my shoulder, he held up one of the star wars happy-meal boxes i’ve saved for sending lunches to school when one of the kids has forgotten to bring his lunchbox home the previous day, and said, “unless you’re darth vader,” and then referenced this infamous craigslist personal ad. while cackling, of course.
and now, i must add: if you actually use as your profile pic a combo type 2/type 3, glamour shot of yourself and your significant other, god help you. you are a bag o’ douche that, after fermenting in the fake tropical sun in your overpriced glamour shots studio, exploded on my computer screen. and i hate you. and your boyfriend’s gay.
by the same token, if you’re doing a combo type 1/type 2, yourself + spouse + offspring… well, i would say god help you, but you not only have no identity of your own, you have no personality whatsoever. your idea of yourself is a “family protrait,” something as sterile, unremarkable, and bland as the words “spouse” and “offspring” themselves.
so fuck it! might as well. you’re not fooling anyone, anyway, and there’s something to be said for truth in advertising.
awwwwww, i’m just kidding. you’re totally pulling this off. in fact, isn’t it time for you to procreate again to keep your “checklist of adherence to social norms” on schedule? go to that dinner party now! kiss your “spouse” like you’re michael jackson and s/he’s… anything over the age of 13. i’m just sayin. you look totally natural and comfortable. truly. you guys are TOTALLY in love. and we’re all going to keep smiling tightly and cooing effusively at your adorable relationship until you go home inevitably early with your lame excuse to cover for the fact that you have no use for each others’ company… at which point we will all breathe sighs of relief, relax, and commence wondering aloud what the hell is wrong with you again, like we did that time we all totally noticed that it took you, like, MONTHS to get around to being each others’ facebook friends. way to be cordial to each other! you guys are awesome… just like your facebook picture!
also, if you’re packing 3 or more people into a 75×75 pixel thumbnail picture, for gods’ sakes, your face – you know, the one someone is trying to see – is about 12 pixels total. game, douche and BAG.
reading over my shoulder again, PRM has accused me of BUI, Blogging Under the Influence. so i told him that we ran out of meth weeks ago, and its too cold in the garage to cook more. and that, if he was going to hover like that, he could give me a damn backrub. because i own him like that. yeah.
before we move on, an exception to the type 1/2/3 combo rules: my cousin Tweety has as his profile a picture of himself and his four girls stuffed into a cardboard box. it’s not only cute, it’s funny as hell. also, you can see his face just fine. i’m not sure how that works, but it probably has something to do with him having a head the size of a watermelon.
onward, ho!
TYPE 4: “me… with the most expensive vacation i’ve ever taken in the background.”
verdict: kinda lame, but definitely acceptable.
it’s a cliche, but what the hell. a pretty background is a pretty background.
TYPE 5: “dude, we’re at this party, and it’s, like, totally freakin awesome WOOOOOO!”
verdict: acceptable.
again, so long as you don’t have 2 or more friends in the shot, making it difficult to see your face, this is usually a non-douchy way to go. really, this style of picture is only douchy if you are a huge, unrepentant douchebag 24/7. i’m just sayin… if you have an orange fakebake that’s 10 shades darker than your dark-rooted hair, eyebrows plucked into an expression of perpetual surprise, and seeing a camera pointed at you makes your brain scream “hey i know let’s do a charlie’s angels pose wouldn’t that be like SOOOOO FUNNY?!?!?!?” … well, there’s just no non-douchy picture that’s ever going to come of that, anyway.
TYPE 6: artsy.
verdict: ranges from kinda lame to kinda awesome; almost always acceptable.
these almost always involve only part of the face being revealed. and that’s fine. art is cool. but there is such a thing as bad art.
a lame example: a tight cropping of a picture so all you see is the eyes. hamfisted attempts at artistry are not convincing anyone of your artistic skills. you can use scissors, yay! so can my five-year-olds.
some good examples: you with a cool hat pulled down over part of your face, you peeking around a corner or up at the camera, you doing something so awesome that you’re only a tiny part of the picture (LiquidCourage, for example, uses a shot of him getting into an FBI “black helicopter.” can’t see his face, but it’s not hard to figure out that, yeah, you found the right guy.)
best example i’ve ever seen: one of my friends took a black-and-white shot of herself where only the right half of her face is in the frame. the backlight is dazzling, making her face a little fuzzy and turning her hair, already a perfect halo of blond curls, into a really bright halo. the overall effect is angelic, surreal, gorgeous, AND you can actually identify her in spite of that, too. winner!
TYPE 7: something funny.
verdict: usually awesome.
while offering up your offspring’s face instead of your own is completely douchy, a picture of something funny that has absolutely nothing to do with personally identifying you is kind of awesome. one condition only: it has to be something that is actually funny. some tired old joke that was funny when your grandma forwarded it to you when she first got on the interwebs 5 years ago is NOT FUCKING FUNNY. it is douchy.
my three favorites in the “funny” category – a guy i just friended from the fencing team, who bears maybe a passing resemblance to rick moranis, if the light is dim and you’re not wearing your glasses, has a picture of spaceballs’ “dark helmet” as his profile pic. the first time i searched him and saw it, i a) knew it was him, and b) laughed my ass off. anybody who randomly brightens my day like that is awesome.
EvilRedHead had as her profile a cookie-cake that was iced to look like her – if she was drawn into a “cathy” comic strip from 1981 – right down to the red hair and glasses. it was 1950s. it was fucked up. it was awesome.
and finally, EvilRedHead’s college roommate, BootyScoots, posted a truly artfully-angled picture of a plastic dolly, face down, dress scooched up to reveal her bare, plastic butt-cleavage. creepy, fucked up, and completely freaking funny. it’s especially funny because she has two little girls, meaning she didn’t conceive and arrange that set-up. it’s just something that innocently happened, and her dirty, dirty mind found the awesomely wrong pornfulness of the situation, and my god do i love her for sharing it with me.
