Fountain of Youth

Now that I'm thirty-five, I've been more and more conscious of getting older. My back sometimes goes out for days at a time, I've found a few gray hairs, and I just got my invitation to subscribe to the AARP magazine. Well, yesterday, I was talking with my grandmother about some pictures that I'd sent her, one of which was a picture of me with my nephew. Evidently when she saw the picture, she didn't know why I'd included a picture of some teenager with the photos. When my mom pointed out that it was me, she was flabbergasted. She said that with that cap on and how skrawny I was, I looked fifteen. My aunt asked me if that was reason enough to start eating more clam dip so I wouldn't look so skrawny and I told them, "No, it's reason enough for me to wear that hat more often!" Any article of clothing that can take twenty years off gets points from me. I wonder if I could wear it to the movies to get a discount?

Here's the picture for the internets to weigh in.

Speaking of deceiving pictures, I remember my photo I submitted to the Norwegian mission office. The lighting in the picture was bad, with a visible shadow cast behind me. Since I have black hair, the shadow made me look like I had a mullet--A MULLET!!! Great!--here I am trying to shake the rural Idaho, just-off-the-reservation look and I submit a photo (that will be my official image throughout my entire mission) of me with a mullet. I may as well have worn overalls and had a hayseed in my mouth. (A picture of me showing my hog at the county fair would have sufficed as well.) Fortunately the mission is a time to reinvent oneself and I made a concerted effort to make people forget about my mullet--now they remember me by my hatred of knocking on strangers' doors, ability to steer religious conversations into meaningless small talk, and penchant for making the missionaries who followed all the rules all the time feel embarrassed about it.