Baby Profile Pics

There are way too many people putting baby pictures on their profile. What's up with that? I mean not pictures of babies created by themselves or by others, but their own pictures from decades ago.

I posed this question a little while ago on Twitter. In the spirit of full disclosure I mentioned that I was guilty of the same for a period of a few weeks and I received a many (un)helpful responses from friends and family.

These are the responses:
Javed Shaikh - Well you could answer that yourself then :)2:01 am
darshan parikh - whose ur baby man?6:25 am
Mifrah Abid - what's up with people who do something and wonder when others do it too? :P5:36 pm

I did it then thinking that it seemed to be the norm. For now I will talk about others and why they do it. As I thought of this more in light of the above comments, I made two observations:

a) It's usually, no almost exclusively guys who are doing this
b) They are not really baby pics, but toddler pics or pics from when they just started going to school.

I have put 2 + 2 together and this is my conclusion: Guys, despite appearances to the contrary, are pretty vain. They want to look good out there on the internet. You never know who is stalking or looking at your pics, right? I mean you can photoshop the hell out of your pics, or get a nice photographer to take a studio pic, but then that looks too staged and you can easily be found out.

Most guys my age are either in the process of balding or greying and don't think that adds much to their sex appeal. On the other side of this equation of balding, slightly pot-bellied males are the girls. Now, barring a few rare exceptions (I know a few myself) girls are naturally attracted to babies. If you placed Brad Pitt, or whoever is current-hunk-of-the-moment, and a pudgy baby dribbling all over itself in a white diaper, the baby will win the attention of the women around.

So, the smart guys have decided to show themselves at their appealing best by posting pics when they were babies, but still distinguishable as an individual. In one fell swoop, you solve all the problems plaguing your current face in the mirror.

Prelude Etude

@ T. S. Eliot

The frost on the windows accumulates
No feet yet sound in the passageways.
Six o'clock.
The chewed-out pens from thoughts.
And now out a notebook fall
The paper scraps
Printout arrayed across the floor
And cars arrive in vacant lots;
The sound of feet
On empty blinds and chimney-pots,
And at the corner of the street
The shop opens its doors to coffee smells.
And then the extinguishing of the lamps.

(October, 2009)

Note: This should have been posted months ago. Discovered this dog-eared page in my Drafts folder. Graduate student days are now distant, but night outs for the final push to get the paper out of the door aren't.

Free lunch?

Ask not what you can do for your country. Ask what's for lunch.
- Orson Welles