Joel Stein: "Don't Email Me Your Baby Photos - They All Look The Same"

[matcom]

:rofl:

:popcorn:

<snip>

I'M A DECENT FRIEND: I'm happy when you're happy, sad when you're sad, thrilled when your career isn't going better than mine.

So when you have a child — or more accurately in Los Angeles, twins — I'm overjoyed that you got to experience the miracle of fertility treatments. But I don't want you to e-mail me your baby pictures.

Here's something you knew before you got pregnant but forgot in the mess of hormones and Nutella: All babies look the same. Yet, immediately after you gave birth, you scheduled an hourlong photo shoot for a person who has such awful bone structure that her brain is unprotected.

I asked my friends who recently had babies to describe them to me, so that I could determine if they are in fact any different from one another. The phrases "super cute" and "button nose" were used a lot. This made me realize that compared to writing descriptions of your kids, maybe photos aren't so bad.

Still, my problem is that there's absolutely no information being passed along in those Flickr slideshows. Unless two Asian people have a black kid, or your baby has clearly identifiable superpowers, I'm getting nothing from the pictures I didn't already know. Except what your wife looks like without makeup after the most physically traumatizing event of her life. There's a reason no one takes pictures the morning after a party at the Playboy Mansion.

I know something wonderful has happened to you, and you want to share it with the world, but you've got to be more disciplined about the bragging. People don't, for example, send mass e-mails saying, "Guess who's making $100K now?" Nor do people generally ask us all to "check out my cancer-free colonoscopy films!" Unless, of course, you're Katie Couric.

I'm fine with you flashing a photo to me over dinner, or showing me the kid when I'm over at your house. In both those situations, I've signed up for an evening when you're going to tell me all sorts of things about your life I'm not interested in.

But when I'm sitting innocently at my computer, you can't expect me to download jpegs and open a separate window to look at images of unidentifiable bulbous flesh. I only do that for porn.

<snip>

Also, don't tell me what the baby weighed at birth; that's creepy. It's one small step away from sending me dilation figures. Again, things I don't need to know about your wife in her time of trauma.

http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/opinion/la-oe-stein6mar06,1,4523491.column?coll=la-news-comment

[InvisibleTouch]

1. Heh. I can relate to that!

On the other hand, I'm baffled when people come in and claim all my sand-colored curly-tailed black-mask puppies "look the same." "No way," I'll point out, "this one has a totally different head structure, that one has a much larger white chest patch, this one has all-black nails vs. the other one who has a white nail on each hindfoot," etc. It all depends on what you're tuned into, I guess! :)

[guitar man]

2. Oh really??

All the same? Well you don't see one like this every day :)

[Commie Pinko Dirtbag]

4. Too much makeup! -nt

[guitar man]

6. That reaction isn't uncommon

I've heard that before when I showed off this pic, that it looked like she had her "makeup" on. That's just how she looked when she was about 18 hours old ;)

[Skittles]

3. I don't mind looking at a couple pics of someone's baby

I dislike it when they hand me a stack - the kid looks the same in every g.d. picture :o

[guitar man]

7. I'm the same way

I keep one or two recent shots with me to show off, but I agree, it is annoying when someone wants you to look at 20 pics of the same kid.

[Hugin]

5. "We all come into the world looking like Alfred Hitchcock and we all go out looking like Alfred...

Hitchcock... God willing." is one of my favorite sayings.

[dolo amber]

8. That's not entirely true, they don't look EXACTLY alike...

Some look like Churchill and some look like Krushchev. :shrug:

[Hugin]

9. But, only one Gorbachev...

:rofl:

[Mad_Dem_X]

10. Excellent! n/t