This is one favorite light piece of the American humorist.

My Face

Robert Benchley

Merely as an observer of natural phenomena, I am fascinated by my own
personal appearance. This does not mean that I am pleased with it, mind
you, or that I can even tolerate it. I simply have a morbid interest in
it.

Each day I look like someone, or something, different, I never know what it is going to be until I steal a look in the glass. (Oh, I don't
suppose you really could call it stealing. It belongs to me, after all.)

One day I look like Wimpy, the hamburger fancier in the Popeye the Sailor saga. Another day it may be Wallace Beery. And a third day, if I
have let my mustache get out of hand, it is Bairnsfather's Old Bill. And not until I peek do I know what the show is going to be.

Some mornings, if I look in the mirror soon enough after getting out of
bed, there is no resemblance to any character at all, either in or out
of fiction, and I turn quickly to look behind me, convinced that a
stranger has spent the night with me and is peering over my shoulder in
a sinister fashion, merely to frighten me. On such occasions, the shock
of finding that I am actually possessor of the face in the mirror is
sufficient to send me scurrying back to bed, completely unnerved.

All this is, of course, very depressing, and I often give off a low moan at the sight of the new day's metamorphosis, but I can't seem to
resist the temptation to learn the worst. I even go out of my way to
look at myself in store-window mirrors, just to see how long it will
take me to recognize myself. If I happen to have a new hat, or am walking with a limp, I sometimes pass right by my reflection without
even nodding. Then I begin to think: "You must have given off some visual impression into that mirror. You're not a disembodied spirit yet
-- I hope."

And I go back and look again, and, sure enough, the stranger-looking man I thought was walking just ahead of me in the reflection turns out to have been my own image all the time. It makes a fellow stop and think, I can tell you.

This almost mascochistic craving to offend my own aesthetic sense by looking at myself and wincing also comes out when snapshots or class
photographs are being passed around. The minute someone brings the
envelope containing the week's grist of vacation prints from the drugstore developing plant, I can hardly wait to get my hands on them. I try to dissemble my eagerness to examine those in which I myself figure, but there is a greedy look in my eye which must give me away.

The snapshots in which I do not appear are so much dross in my eyes, but I pretend that I am equally interested in them all.

"This is very good of Joe," I say, with a hollow ring to my voice, sneaking a look at the next print to see if I am in it.

Ah! Here, at last, is one in which I show up nicely. By "nicely" I mean
"clearly." Try as I will to pass it by casually, my eyes rivet themselves on that cornor of the group in which I am standing. And then, when the others have left the room, I surreptitiously go through the envelope again, just to gaze my fill on the slightly macabre sight of Myself as others see me.

In some pictures I look even worse than I had imagined. On what I call my "good days," I string along pretty close to form. But day in and day out, in mirror or in photograph, there is always that slight shock of surprise which, although unpleasant, lends a tang to the adventure of peeking. I never can quite make it seem possible that that is really Poor Little Me, the Little Me I know so well and yet who frightens me so when face to face.

My only hope is that, in this constant metamorphosis which seems to be going on, a winning number may come up sometime, if only for a day. Just what the final outcome will be, it is hard to predict. I may settle down to a constant, plodding replica of Man Mountain Dean in my old age, or change my style compeletely and end up as a series of Bulgarian peasant types. I may just grow old along with Wimpy.

But whatever is in store for me, I shall watch the daily modulations with an impersonal fascination not unmixed with awe at Mother Nature's gift for caricature, and will take the bitter with the sweet and keep a stiff upper lip.

As a matter of fact, my upper lip is pretty fascinating by itself, in a bizaare sort of way.