Loose Leafing: A Friendship in Bad Selfies

In case you missed the post where I guiltily admitted that if I didn't have the time to write up two or three posts on a weekend, the blog would almost surely go dark for a week, you've just seen it.  Or, wait, maybe you just didn't see it.  I didn't have time to amuse you with my bookish ramblings last week because I was busy catching up with an old friend who came to visit for the weekend.

 That's her (and me) at Walden Pond.

Methinks Thoreau would probably not be impressed.

With this friend, our relationship may be primarily defined by our penchant for taking ridiculous selfies.  I don't remember exactly when it started, but I know it started before "selfie" was made into a legitimate term.  We referred to them as the much clunkier "self-taking photographs." It could have started when I visited her when she was abroad in London while we were both in college.  We took a scenic and also hilarious bus tour through the Scottish Highlands and alienated most of our tour group by being irritatingly reclusive and refusing any and all well-intentioned offers from others to take our picture, instead favoring the juvenile inclination to take selfie "thug shots" at any and all historic landmarks.

Rockin' the porch couch is almost as scary as the future.

Whether it started there or not, I have a fine catalog of ridiculous photos of her and I with lots of chins making stupid faces.  There's the one where we're sitting on my family's discarded loveseat on my front porch in our graduation caps looking intentionally terrified either of the future or of what big hicks we looked like during that brief window of time when we had a "porch couch" to sit on. There's a winner from Thanksgiving where one of us is "drinking" out of the gravy boat.  We even went through a lengthy phase in which we would buy a disposable camera and take ourselves to a nearby amusement park where we would take selfies and crazy shots of each other on various rides.  Secure your loose items?  I think not!  Ergo, I have some fantastic pictures where we look utterly terrified by going through the train tunnel, a backwards taken shot of me being splashed on the log flume, and one of my personal favorites, a shot from the Great Bear at Hersheypark where I'm grinning like an idiot, and the location of the cloud behind me clearly shows that I'm upside down in the sky.  All this even before those great cameras that "officially" take your pictures on all the rides.

 She is a selfie taking professional from way back.

We proved this weekend that it doesn't matter how old you get or how many years its been since you rode a particular roller coaster, when you're a cheeseball like us, you never forget where the camera is, and you definitely don't forget to pose for it.  This past weekend, the first time on the coaster we both spontaneously yanked ourselves from average roller coaster enjoyment to give an enthusiastic thumbs up as we zoomed under the camera. The second time we planned a little better, and that shot elicited the rarest of instances.  We bought the picture instead of just giggling at it on the display screen.  Observe:

 Disclaimer: My face doesn't really look like that...

Usually.

I hope you laughed.  I worked hard on perfecting that look.  It even got some laughs from the guy who was sitting behind us.

Here's a few other highlights from our weekend adventuring.

There's the cute one from the train...

Aww!

 ...and also the one where I look like a scared photo-bombing phantom.

Ahhh!

There's one thing you can say for Crystal and me - for better or worse, we'll always have stupid selfies!

Do you and your friends have any goofy traditions?  

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