By Deena BustilloPLAY Editor

If a picture’s worth 1,000 words, I’m pretty sure this lovely mug shot is screaming “cheeks!” for 999 of them. But it’s fine. My facial baby fat has a death grip on the cheekbones I just know are lurking around there somewhere. Friends call me Baby Huey (the cartoon duck with chunker cheeks) and I have to worry about cheek cellulite – on my face, and my ass. Rough life. But the worst thing is, even if the rest of my body was like Nicole Richie’s skin-and-bones frame, a third of my weight would be in plain sight, smacked on my either side of my nose. In fact, if I took this mug again post-celeb body swap, you would think I was 485 pounds, not a mere 85. Like you care.

But, you know exactly what I’m talking about – well, for your sake, hopefully not about the cheeks. Pictures haunt us through every stage of life. From the plastic storage bins filled with “sentimental” photos of you eating your first carrot and apple and pear and melon (when chubby cheeks were acceptable) to the pictures of heinous school dance attire, our childhoods are forever remembered through six-inch pieces of glossy paper.

Now we’ve matured, though, moved away from camera-crazed Mom and Dad, and abandoned obsessive photography, right? Wrong. We’ve become our parents. We’re the ones armed with pocket-sized digital cameras to document everything – the good, the bad and especially the wasted. Then we proudly display the night’s debauchery in a Facebook album with snarky captions in hopes that an ex whatever happens to glance through our 1,400 pictures and see the strategically captioned one of us with some random dude. And it just so happened that he walked up as soon as our camera was ready, smile was plastered on and shirt was pulled down just enough. Admit it.

So when it comes down to it, pictures are really just weapons in college. Judging, wooing, wrecking – you name it. That 5-mega pixel silver box can make or break your social life one blinding flash at a time.

And that’s where we’re different from our genuine parents. We take pictures to screw someone over or get someone to want to screw us. And that’s depressing because it leaves me with a head shot more suited for a pre-treatment liposuction advertisement. That’s hardly the kind of advertising I imagined for this column. I thought I was getting a free personal ad. Not so much.

I guess I have to suck it up (literally, I wish), and hope you can see past the cheeks and enjoy PLAY this quarter. Next issue there will be some new shocks – more shocking than the debut of my enormous cheeks even. These babies are a big act to follow, but I think PLAY can pull through.

Medill junior Deena Bustillo is the PLAY editor. She can be reached at d-bustillo@northwestern.edu.