I like this photo. It looks like an artsy advertisement for my backpack. The highlighting of the brand name, Zuolunduo, looks intentionally framed to draw attention to it. Colour balancing, lighting = exquisite. If taking an excellent image to advertise the brand name of my backpack was the purpose, then I would say I nailed it. Stamp of approval.
But that was not why I took this picture. The truth is much more embarrassing. The fact was that I was walking down the street and was trying to surreptitiously take a picture of my butt in order to assess for water damage. Let me explain.
The 'water damage' was not intentional, indeed I suspect very rarely people try to wet their pants in such a way that it looks like they have incontinence. But I had gotten only about four hours of sleep the night before, and I had gotten off work early. I had somewhere else I needed to be nearby in about an hour so it was a waste to go home, but I didn't want to spend money. It was also about a gazillion degrees out. To prevent myself from feeling birdcaged within the four walls of my office I vowed to myself to brave the urban jungle and find a small shaded piece of grass somewhere near the canal where I could rest my weary bones.
Imagine my bliss when I found the perfect patch of grass. Compared to scorching reflection of hot pavement, the cool shaded strip of lawn was temperature perfection. As I settled onto the grass, grateful for a respite in which I could recline, I became aware of my first miscalculation: the grass was a little bit wet. Oh right, it had rained the night before. Had it really been possible in the scorching temperatures of the day that this ground hadn't quite already dried out?
Incredible. I was too tired to care in the moment about the wet grass. I had an hour to rest and the place was cool. I set up my backpack as a pillow and did my best napping impression, letting the whole of my body relax into the soft, cool, green, slightly damp blanket beneath me.
My second miscalculation became evident when I stood up. The pants I had chosen to wear that day, as you can tell in the picture, were a light golden brown, and as I bowed my head to take stock of the parts of my pantleg that had touched the ground I could see a dark brown wet spot. It was bold. It was pronounced. It was unforgiving. I reached back to touch the part of my butt that I couldn't crane my head around to see. "Wet," my hand said back to me through the neural tactile pathways to my brain. Crap. Here I was, a respectable self-employed business woman, psychotherapist in mental health practice, about to walk around in public, to church, looking like she had wet herself.
There was only one thing I could do: radical acceptance. Accept the loss to my pride.
And so I set out towards the church, trying as much as I could to use my backpack and lunchbag for cover, all the while knowing that neither could actually cover the problem without bringing more attention to it. The embarrassment ate at me. I felt like I had to know how bad the damage was. So after a minute of brainstorming I figured out how I could put the camera in my hand to prevent it from being so obvious to the passing cars that I was taking a targeted photo of my butt. Bring up the camera function, flip the phone case closed, while you are walking swing your arms in a slightly exaggerated fashion behind you, press the down volume button to take the photo and voila!
It worked, kind of. Butt, as you can see.... no water stains. To my great and immediate relief, the laws of thermodynamics came through for me. What a divine boon that it was actually hot enough outside to evaporate all the evidence of 'water damage' in the one minute it took me to figure out how to use my camera!
