If you give a mouse a cookie...

...or, as I like to say, "If you let a Georgian use your iPhone once..."

I made the dangerous mistake a few weeks ago of letting Ani, my host sister, use my phone to take some photos. She was bored, and I figured this would be a good way of keeping her out of our host mothers hair. So into the App Store I went, and upon her request I downloaded a camera called Retrica. If you're not aware of Retrica, you're not missing anything. It is a program specially designed for people to take selfies. But she's a thirteen year old girl, and I thought, "What could possibly go wrong with this?"

And nothing's gone wrong, per se, except for the fact that I've created a selfie craving monster. Add in the two neighbor girls who, three times this week, wanted to go out and take pictures of themselves, and I've got a whole cluster of teenage Georgian girls who insist on posing "nicely" for 100 pictures at a time.

This is what my poor photo library looks like. 399 pictures. I'm halfway tempted to tell my host parents I will pitch in money to buy my host sister a phone of her own so my poor phone can get a god damn break!

I'm about as much of a cam whore as your average upper twentysomething year old. I don't particularly like taking pictures where I intentionally look decent, because it feels silly, so I'd much rather just look as silly as I feel. Unfortunately, Ani is a thirteen year old girl who is caught up in this web of "everything must look nice always" cultural mentality.  Naturally, my weird faces and goofy quirks when taking pictures confused her at the beginning. I think she's finally getting used to my "monkey faces" (I really must look like a monkey, because my grandfather, father, uncles, and now a Georgian girl all have called me "monkey face"), and "big arms" thing. She still yells at me about the "big arms" thing, however, so I don't know if I will ever be able to get her totally used to that. I make it a point to be even more ridiculous in these pictures that the teenage Georgian girls force me to take - and I do mean force. They grabbed my face and put lipstick on me the other day, informing me that they wanted to "look nice for Facebook."

Oh, and have I mentioned that Georgians love Facebook? Cause they do. Most teenagers I've met don't do anything on the internet EXCEPT for Facebook. My host siblings both spend hours just clicking through photos of their friends, or of random pages, or chatting with people they know. And not that this is any different than most other teenagers, because I'm sure I did the same thing, but I also remember going onto forums and participating in eRPGs (Yeah, that's right. I joined a crew of an email role playing game of a fictional Star Trek ship. Cause that's a normal thing for an eleven year old to do...?), and making websites dedicated to god knows what, and forget the day that Space.com happened, because that might've just been the most marvelous day ever in my little prepubescent life. And I guess that's yet another perk of speaking English - a lot of vary diverse content is available to us online. Content that may not even be translatable into Georgian. But my host siblings don't do ANYTHING. They know Facebook, and Youtube, and some strange Russian version of Facebook, and that's it. No emails, in fact I'm pretty sure that most kids don't know how to even compose and send an email. All Facebook. All the time.

Anyway. Sure, little Georgian teenagers. Let's make sure we "look nice for Facebook." I'm glad that you've got the priorities down!

Inevitably, once we take a minimum of 20 photos, and a maximum that so far has yet to exceed 130 (Yup.), they will want the pictures IMMEDIATELY TO PUT ONLINE. With my sister, it's easy - I just send them to her via messages on, you guessed it, Facebook. Six at a time cause that's all you can do. But that's doable. I don't mind doing that. It becomes another matter altogether when dealing with more than one Georgian girl.

We spent an hour one night this week trying to get pictures from my phone to Rusa, my neighbor, because her Internet at home was out and she did not want to wait. She brought a jump drive over, and I told her that if it was formatted a certain way that my computer would not be able to work with it. She laughed, and then was confused when, shocker, my Mac could not read her Windows formatted USB stick. I tried explaining it again, and she asked me, "But, what version of Windows do you have?" No version of Windows. It is another type of computer. Mine and Windows do not get along. They are not friends. "...Is it Windows 8? I have Windows 7. That is why." No. No it's not. Mine is not Windows. At all! She then suggested that I take my phone to her house to plug into her computer. I told her no, that it would not work (Which I mean, it probably would have, but I wasn't about to a) go outside AGAIN, b) plug my poor iPhone into some Windows machine and c) have to deal with an interface on the computer that was probably in Russian or Georgian and has god knows how many weird ass viruses on it just so an impatient 14 year old can get some glamor shots where her face is completely over exposed!), and she suggested plugging her phone into my computer. So an Android media managing app download later, and still we could not get photos onto her computer. We ended up having to take out her micro SD card, stick it in my card adapter, and just give her the pictures that way. And I guess maybe I should have thought of that first, but why would I give any more thought to getting this chick her pictures when SHE WOULD JUST BE ABLE TO DOWNLOAD ALL OF THEM OFF OF FACEBOOK WHEN SHE GOT INTERNET AGAIN.

It was a really frustrating evening. Unsure if you've picked up on that one.

The whole "we must look nice constantly" thing is really starting to wear on me. It's an unrealistic expectation, and makes people just get incredibly petty and shitty with each other, all the while keeping women, especially here, in the outdated roles in which they find themselves. Which is why I insist on my default face for pictures with young Georgian girls to be silly. I want them to see that it's ok to laugh at yourself, and that you don't have to always good.

I think it's working a little bit. My host sister has gotten significantly goofier while I've been here, although whether it's her just getting more comfortable with me or I am actually making her weird is hard to say. I do know that before I came around most of her pictures on Facebook were your typical vacant eyed model inspired faces and poses that many girls here (and let's be real, anywhere with internet access) are so fond of. And now she has a few where she's got her eyes crossed, and her tongue is out, or she's making a sass face. I'd like to think a small part of that is me, but until she herself starts to do the "big arms" thing I don't think I'll be able to take any kind of credit.