How to Look Good #18

"You know what? I always feel a sharp stab of guilt anytime I save a picture of an attractive girl onto my hard drive. I feel it in my shoulders, and it makes me sit up. Straight. I mean, I only save ones that are good on their own, you know, picture qua picture, it's not like it's a voyeuristic, leering thing. Well, any more than usual, you know? But come on, that's a philosophical quagmire. It might be my mother's doing, or else I know it would probably fall to my girlfriend to sift through these thousand pictures if I go. Ads, tees, newspaper clippings, chairs, people swimming with tigers, loops of people jumping, batmen, clouds shaped like owls, periodic tables of everything. But then there's a hipster photo of some young miss, and she's probably actually a model paid to do this, but she's holding a Nikon and it feels a little invasive. But I really like the lighting or what-the-hell-is-that in her hair, it looks like a flower made out of string beans. I'm saving for posterity, you know what I mean? I'm making a style guide, for, I don't know, precisely the moment I need one. And I have pictures of guys, too, so what's the problem? Yeah, I think that, but still the shoulders. A stab and a weight. Heavy like explaining it to your grandmother and grandfather. So the explanations, which sound like excuses. It's not quite a matter of careful rationing, but it's close. You can save one non-celebrity non-group female photograph for every six comic strips in Russian. Or that sort of thing. Which really, if you want to get into things, defeats the whole purpose of collecting anything interesting you see. Of having a personal collection. Dammit, if I want to save that animated gif that has fifty onscreen women having fifty onscreen orgasms, then by golly I'm going to save it. Because it reminds me of Warhol. Because it looks mesmerizing. Because, you know, the male gaze and Mulvey and all that. Because this is my computer and it's not yours. But, you know, Hamlet, I doth protest too much, yethinks. I get that. It's still going to get saved, I mean, this is a random image generator, if I don't it'll disappear forever, for all I know. So I'm going to save it. But hell if it's going on my blog."

"Oh, and this is the maid speaking, by the way."