Don't You Forget About Me...

Until I finish sorting through (and then filing in strict alphabetical order) the huge pile of suggestions I’ve received from all you ladies out there as to what I might better be doing with my hands and lips since I quit smoking last week, I’ve had to keep myself busy over this first non-smoking weekend. So on Saturday I went out to get a haircut in the morning and then I spent the whole afternoon playing with myself. On a website called yearbookyourself.com.

Yearbooks were one of the many things I used to envy about life in American High Schools – spending Saturdays in the library with Molly Ringwald being the other principle one. Cameras, having not long been invented, were a bit pricey when I was at High School so I have very little photographic record of just how cool and not-at-all awkward I no doubt was during my six years there.

The premise of the website is pretty straightforward although using it was a total pain. Upload a photo, select a year from 1950 - 2000, choose a local ‘mall’ so you can be prompted with shopping suggestions while you’re going along (wtf?), shoogle the photo about a bit, hit ‘save’, type your password five bloody times, hit ‘save’ again, do the hokey-pokey, and hey bingo, you’ve got your own yearbook photos and with it, the chance you’ve always dreamt about… going to the prom with Andrew McCarthy.

Anyway, the resultant photos are shown below for your amusement together with some additional observations explaining why they freaked me out somewhat.

1964 – This is the year I was born. Having always been told that I looked like my Mum, I think this photo makes me look EXACTLY like my Dad.

1976 – This is the year I started High School. I could swear that I have that exact same haircut and polo neck in a photo from that year.

1988 – This is me during my run in the hit tv comedy ‘Family Ties’. Ho ho ho, just kidding, but all Michael J Fox references aside, turn the hair blond and this is what I probably looked like in 1988.

1994 – I’ve always been told that I resemble my sister rather than my two brothers but OMG, I think I look exactly like my brother Stuart (web genius who’s still available for all manner of freelance work) in this photo.

So hours of fun to be had by all, but one final thought for my good friend Dave... you know how you’ve spent a lifetime with the frustrating feeling that you were born into somebody else’s “skin” and are saving up your pennies to have the “procedure” to become the “person” you always wanted to be? Well, not that I tried it or anything but apparently if you want a “heads-up” on how the “procedure” might turn out, you can upload your photo into some female templates also. Selecting a completely random example at random, if you wanted to see how you’d look with some impressively mighty, backcombed 80s hair, you could so totally do that. Apparently.