Adventures on Muni

Today on the way to work, a woman got on the Muni and sat in front of me.  She was a statuesque middle-aged woman with bright blonde wildly large hair.  I have a feeling her hair is normally a lovely curl but she probably got made fun of as a kid for having kinky hair so now she brushes it out and tries to make it straight.  Perhaps she didn’t have time to really get in there and style this morning because it was a little crazy but no less crazy than mine.  Her thick, dark rimmed glasses and bright green shiny purse made me assume she is in the creative field, so the crazy hair most likely only benefits her at her place of business.

I caught myself staring at her for a little too long and didn’t want to look like that guy on the train so I shook my head and snapped out of it.  But just as I was turning to look at the happy dogs running around Duboce Park, the tall blonde whipped out her iPhone and went to unlock it.  The phone had a normal, humble black case that matched her black ear buds.  Nothing crazy there.  But.  Her phone wallpaper image caught my eye because it was a selfie of her smiling back at herself.

I tried to go through the steps it took for her to go from the stock grey stone wallpaper that comes with your phone to deciding to use the selfie she took of herself on a good hair day.  First, she had to take the selfie.

Now, I’m not really a selfie person.  When I’m on my phone trying to take a picture and I accidentally push the “Face Time” mode on the camera, a double chinned, high contrasty version of me comes up and I start to rethink the way I let myself leave the house in the morning.  I’ve never taken a selfie where I was like, “Holy shit.  This is the one.  I look AMAZING.”  Instead, I’m like, “Holy shit.  Maybe I should invest in microdermabrasion and lose like 3o pounds.”.  But for Blondie, I bet she did her hair and proclaimed, “Holy shit.  I am on FIRE today.  Gotta document this.”  So she snapped five or six selfies and decided on the perfect one to use as her new Facebook photo.

So we’ve got the selfie.  Next is the decision to set it as her wallpaper on her phone.  I once tried to have a cool wallpaper on my phone, but I don’t have children or pets to blast on there, so I just kept the generic mason design and left it at that.  I’m sure Blondie has kids and probably a really cute dog that resembles her fluffy locks.  Why not choose that as the wallpaper?  No.  Not as cute as her selfie so that’s the one she went with.

Maybe she’s onto something.  Maybe a nice photo of yourself staring back at yourself is like buying one of those “Keep Calm and Carry On” posters that gets you pumped up every morning.  Maybe the selfie pushes her to be a better person each day.  Maybe I should try it for a week and see how it changes my life…

…nope.

As Blondie left the train I smiled at her (trying to be as un-creepy as I could be) and she left the train with a smile on her face.  I silently gave her a “You go girl” and only hoped I had a shred of her self-confidence when I’m her age.  Hell, I’d like to have a shred of it at my current age.

Then I stopped and thought to myself, maybe she has an identical twin and it’s just a picture of her as her wallpaper and I’m just a giant asshole for thinking about it too much.  Oh well.