Maybe Their Flashbulb Gives you a Sunburn...

Well, even though I'm still missing a few club membership cards, my wallet woes are by-and-large coming to a close. I have my three most important and necessary items: my Student ID Card, my Washington Mutual Debit Card, and my Driver's License. The latter item was forwarded up to me today, and I'll admit, I was curious, and a little bit nervous, as to what my new picture would turn out like.

Now, truth be told, I could have kept my old picture (after all, it'll be only another year and two months before I have to get a new, alcohol-approved license), but I decided not to. Now, don't get me wrong; I personally think that my old driver's license picture was great, one of the best ever taken at any DMV. The thing is, it's a picture of what I looked like when I was 16. I currently don't look the same as I did back then. I looked more like this (I don't know if this is actually when I was 16, but it's in the same basic timeframe):

So, yeah, it looks a bit different from the current incarnation (though the smile is still there). What comes of this is that whenever I showed someone my driver's license, a good portion of the time, I'd have to provide a small disclaimer verifying the fact that this was, indeed, mine. So, I decided that a current picture would circumvent this dilemma.

Still, at the DMV, they took one picture, and didn't give me the opportunity to see it. They just gave me my reciept and I was on my way. That was nervewracking, let me tell you. Especially when they say that so many licenses turn out ugly.

Anyhoo, when I recieved the license in the mail, I opened the envelope with trepidation. When I fianlly saw the card...I had mixed feelings.



There is both good and bad in this. I'll start with the good. What's really amazing is how similar I am in pose with my original picture. You've never seen it, so you wouldn't know, but the similarities are uncanny. My smile, my eyes looking in the distance (perhaps towards the future), my cocked head (which appears in nearly all my profile pictures): it's all the same. You could literally take my head from the first picture, and use the pose in the second, and you'd end up with something pretty darn close to the old one.

Now, the problems.

I'm going to start with the most troublesome: what the hell is up with my color? It looks like I just spent a week in the desert with no sunscreen (and looks even worse on the actual card)! My face should have a muted tan look, not this beet-red madness! Has this over-saturation happened on anyone else's license? I really thing they should have their system fixed...

Second, my head is waaay too small. No, not in real (my head is ginormous in the real world), but in the picture. My head (not counting goatee) takes up less than half the picture. That's not supposed to be. A good driver's license picture (and the legal requirements for a passport photo) is that the head should be at least 2/3 of the picture. This makes sense and looks better, too. No one cares what my t-shirt said on the day I took this picture (and for those of you that do, it was "CALIFORNIA" in big letters). There's no reason why the bottom six inches of this couldn't be cropped out.

Oh, and it may just be a trick of angles and such, but I think my hair at the corners of my forehead might be receding!

Ah well, I guess it's not that bad. I've seen much worse. What's important is that I now have a driver's license again, and a current one to boot...even though everyone I show it to may think I'm going to have skin cancer within 3 years.