By Dan Roeder
Round Table reporter

Senior photos are supposed to be important, so I’ve been told, but I had never really subscribed to the value of them.

They would make sense, of course, if my scintillating beauty had propelled me through my high school career, for it would be necessary to encapsulate it. However, I fail to believe that my looks were my strongest asset (despite the inscrutable quality of my hips, which are very honest).

I finally ended up getting the pictures taken a few days ago as they have been causing tension between my mother and I the whole week preceding it. I’m not a slob, by any means, but I’m not a paragon of human excellence or anything. Because of my ‘sleep as an option’ mentality, my hatred of weight-lifting, and my devotion to french fries and root beer, I’ve never been viewed as particularly healthy or attractive, but it hadn’t affected me until talk of pictures came up.

My mom really wanted to preserve my unassuming, 18 year-old face so that we could view them when I have an unassuming middle-aged face. It would have been fine, had she not begun to campaign for me to worry more about my looks.

Upon seeing myself in mother’s Yenta-lenses, I saw a lot more wrong with myself than I had ever really cared to see. My skin grew paler, my lack of muscle definition became more visible, and I developed an uncanny sense of loss; as though my looks were a long-lost friend that I abandoned.

To prepare for the pictures, my mom had given me special toothpaste, skin cream, a new razor and consistently oversized shirts, and in turn, I avoided her at all costs. Like all abandoned friends, there was a reason I didn’t concern myself with appearance; a well groomed face is persistent, needy and selfish.

The shoot itself, in contrast, took twenty minutes. The photographer was a very nice woman and the sheer absurdity of my mother’s deliberate, anxious facial expressions kept my face in a perpetual smirk. I’ll get my pictures in a few days, and unfortunately for my mom, I’ll look a whole lot like myself. In the meanwhile, I’ll go back to my standard, slovenly routine.

Although I’m mildly relieved that this experience (both the pictures and my senior year) is coming to an end and, as I had expected, it’s never really as big of a deal as anyone would like to make you believe, I don’t think this story has a coda. I didn’t really learn anything, but there are a ton of other age-old, slightly mindless senior traditions, and I plan on weathering every single one with a grain of salt on my french fries.