Nobody ever formally appointed me the group's official photographer, and yet, somehow, here we still are again.የቡድኑን ኦፊሴላዊ ፎቶግራፍ አንሺ በይፋ ማንም አልሾመኝም፣ ሆኖም ግን፣ በሆነ መንገድ፣ አሁንም እዚህ ነን።
It's a coronation, essentially, that nobody witnesses but everyone somehow silently, universally agrees upon anyway.በመሠረቱ ማንም የማይመሰክርበት ዘውድ ነው፣ ነገር ግን ሁሉም ሰው በሆነ መንገድ በጸጥታ፣ በአጠቃላይ በሁሉም ነገር የሚስማማበት።
One decent photograph taken at a birthday party back in 2019, and suddenly it became my permanent occupation.
Competence, quite tragically, remains the single most reliable path toward lifelong, entirely unpaid conscription.
Meanwhile, I've personally appeared in exactly four photographs across these last six full years, total count.
I've somehow achieved a kind of documented invisibility most people spend entire fortunes trying to attain honestly.
Future historians, presumably, will assume I simply never attended a single family gathering, ever, at all.
A kind of ghost, technically present at every gathering, yet entirely absent from the visual record, forever suspicious.
I've started demanding someone else hold the camera at least once per gathering, entirely and predictably futilely.
Those requests get politely acknowledged and then instantly, comprehensively forgotten, every single time without fail.
Instantly, honestly. Someone hands me the phone before my own sentence even reaches its final syllable, typically.
There's a certain tragic poetry, honestly, in becoming so reliable that reliability itself entirely erases you.
Perhaps at our next reunion I'll deliberately take terrible, blurry photos as a form of quiet, silent protest.
A bold strategy, admittedly, though genuine incompetence risks simply being interpreted as an unfortunate off day instead.
True enough. They'd simply hand me an even better camera, convinced the equipment was somehow the actual problem.
The conscription itself, it truly seems, remains entirely inescapable, permanent, and disturbingly self-reinforcing overall.
