Nov 14th, 2025 Friday Sunny
My company recently launched the annual “cutest pet photo contest”. Personally, I think such an activity is pointless, if you believe the true purpose is to select THE CUTEST pet that the employees own.
To start, I am convinced that every pet parent must think of their own fur baby as the cutest in the world, and as there is no rule against voting for your own submission, it is essentially a popularity competition so whoever can rack most support among their coworkers can crown their puppy/kitty in glory.
More importantly, how on earth can you judge the adorable level of a creature that plays, lives, and snuggles, from a SINGLE photo?
If I am trying to be as objective as possible, I could say that Sesame’s cutest moments tend to be stationary – napping on my lap like a sack of potatoes (he likes to have his two arms dangling on opposite sides), or showing his signature belly-up pose with a pleading look in eyes (still not sure what he is asking for – perhaps attention, though he has fallen asleep like that too…). But I tend to feel most touched when he stands up on his legs while atop the vanity, so he can reach my face and “kiss” me, a tenderness that is hardly captured through a camera lens.
As for Yuuki, she is constantly on the move, and that may be part of her charm. I cannot withhold my laughter when she persisted in snatching a buttered toast from my husband’s hand, or buried her face into the bowl of oatmeal (yes, apparently she LOVES that, possibly because her daddy eats it for breakfast every day, so she deems it “an appropriate big cat food”) enjoying all the crunches she could stuff into her mouth before cinnamon was added, which drove her away. My husband might also nominate her climbing him like a tree then perching on his shoulders, despite the scratches he has to endure. Not to mention her unsolicited help in “sculpting” a cat castle made of cardboard boxes (whose windows have been enlarged threefold in over a year).
None of those lively memories can be caught easily in a picture. What a shame!
However, this “present your best” practice seems so common, especially in the adult world, in the many mini social interactions we have with others.
Some of them we meet for the first time, and they want an elevator pitch about our decades of life history in a nutshell, either to form a quick judgment, or to satisfy their need for a brief distraction. They see us as no different from a character in a movie, whose setup can be summarized in a couple of sentences.
Some of them have known us for a while, yet they barely KNOW us. They sought a brief introduction with us at the initial encounter, then stored our information in their brain as a short “entry”. Since then, every later meeting is an update to the entry, and takes the same format as a series of bullet points.
How can we ever hope to create meaningful connections through such perfunctory analysis of each other?
Of course, I gladly participated in that contest at workplace, because the real intention behind it might as well be an entertainment and source of joy in the otherwise mundane environment.