“When you look like your passport photo, it’s time to go home,” humorist Erma Bombeck once said.

I have to agree with that. I’ve had maybe a couple of decent passport photos, but everything else is a horrendous mess. My first Schengen visa contains a photo of me looking like a tubby old Chinese lady with no eyebrows; my current passport photo makes me look like I sat on a prickly burr just before the photog pressed the shutter. Today, upon discovering that the nearest Kodak outlet to my house was closed (why? why?), I had to head to a random Digiprint in Cubao just to have a photo taken in time for my document pickup tomorrow. The dude didn’t even know the standard size for Schengen visas and spent a lot of time asking if he could keep my photo on file. As the washed-out photo makes me look like a chubby ghost (a friend remarked, “Wow, you look really fat”), I don’t even know why anyone would bother.

But at the end of the day, I really don’t mind—having a visa photo taken means I could be going somewhere, and that’s more than enough for me.