Why My Avatar
Behind every profile pic is a story. Here’s mine. What’s yours?
Security goons wearing cheap suits standing in front of a poker club stare across the shared lobby at Russian tourists mobbing the hotel’s reception desk. Each guest has a dozen pieces of designer luggage and a rack of furs, stacks of Monopoly money clutched in gold rings and watches and bracelets. Business men are on the phone with women named Maria, or being lead away by women named Maria fresh from taxis.
We’re drinking a beer brewed just outside Chernobyl as per the bartender’s recommendation, and he replaces the ashtray each time a cigarette is crushed out. I’m not ready to step out into the sweltering afternoon. I’m not ready to get lost on the metro again, or try to transliterate Cyrillic street signs, or to try and find some place where two vegetarians can eat. But Kiev was out there.
Janice took a picture of me trying not to lose it after we stepped outside.
It became my avatar a year later when The Bold Italic needed a portrait to run alongside a couple article, but they didn’t like the shots of me in shadow or at weird angles or passed out on buses. They liked me hamming it up for the camera across the street from Maidan Nezalezhnosti, my overblown caricature of a sleazy American hitting the town standing in for the rattled kid of reality.
To put in to full context my profile pic, we must rewind through the 24 hours prior to its making.
Getting to Kiev had been nightmare. The windows of the train were sealed and they wouldn’t turn on the lights. A customs agent with a mustache and sidearm disappeared with our passports for an hour, letting soldiers armed with machine guns and German Shepherds bark at us in foreign while shining flashlights in our eyes. Fourteen hours later, spent stuck to vinyl bunks and vying for the car’s only toilet with a hundred of our closest strangers, I rode into town on delirium.
I wish that I’d had a more honest portrayal of my first day there, where the fatigue and disorientation and thrilling panic of stepping into the unknown wasn’t masked beneath a dumb pose. Kiev was a wonderful disaster, all frayed nerves and vodka breakfasts, being abandoned by fixers and being hung up on by receptionists. I loved it.
So when I see avatars I wonder where they came from and why they were chosen. Pretty ones, ugly ones, professional portraits and badly lit selfies — are there stories behind people’s internet facemasks?
What’s your excuse for your avatar? What’s the backstory to your profile pic? Let me know in the responses field below.
