Hey Marjan,
first of all, sorry for not replying to your comment! I was expecting to get a notification upon any comments, but it seems I need to figure out a way to set that up properly still.

And now for an answer of sorts:

For me, criticising things is in many ways enjoying them as fully as possible. One way to go about enjoying things is to enjoy them at face value, which is great for some things (examples of which have escaped me for the past couple of minutes of thinking about it, but I know there are examples! the reason I can’t think of any is because my head keeps circling back around to the next sentence I’m about to write). Another way to go about enjoying things is by ripping them to shreds. This doesn’t have to be a negative thing. People do it when they’re watching sports, figuring out why a particular football play was chosen, why it failed, etc. We do it when enjoying food, trying to pick apart all the flavours with our weak taste buds.

I thoroughly enjoy taking things apart, but doing so often comes at the price of comparing things overmuch. This can’t be escaped for me. Overall, I’d sooner suffer the comparisons and letdowns than give up ripping things apart. Particularly my own brain, which may soon explode upon the realisation that I just entered one of those thought processes that just goes deeper and deeper and deeper into itself. NOOOOO!!!

And I did take a nice picture of myself. The problem is that it’s much, much too large. I take very few closeup shots of myself (just recently getting into the habit).
The original picture can be found here: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/3049618/replication%20project%201%20smaller.png
(a picture I never did go back and touch up, now I think of it)

Despite how absolutely gorgeous I may think I am, I don’t have a camera anymore. So I do not have a good tool other than my phone camera to take pictures of myself and… everything else.

Thanks for the comment! Hopefully this explains some of the contradiction I hadn’t realised I’d created in my post (the criticizing things vs being happy). I continue to absolutely refuse to believe that criticism has to steal away from satisfaction (though I may end up being wrong about it).