It's those teensy photograph stickers of people that keep popping up everywhere. Maybe you haven't seen them yet (though that seems unlikely). The kiosks are like digital photo booths but instead of vending four unique photos of you and yours voguing behind the curtain they produce twenty identical 1x2 cm stickers. Because the booths are digital you get three chances to take strike your pose, plus a few other silly options such as festive flower borders or "sepia" toned prints.

The stickers look great on techno toys. I've seen them on Palm Pilots, Motorola StarTacs and laptops of all ilks. But I've also seen them on the back of bus seats, inside phone booths and all over the cash registers in half a dozen local coffee houses.

The entire phenomenon is a perfect counterpoint to the rest of our modern lives. In a world where increasingly we are defined by inhuman strings of letters and numbers -- ATM passwords, voicemail codes and E-mail domain names -- it seems only natural that the need to give face to our passage should culminate in such a literal manner.

However, their public appearance on these phones and cash registers belies the fact that the first dozen or so of the twenty you receive for three dollars have already been given away to friends. The stickers are being traded, not unlike yesterday's calling cards. My name, address, phone number and website are publicly available to anyone who takes the time to run a simple search and therefore the giving out of that information can no longer be thought of as a giving of self, as an act of intimacy. But a photographic sticker on the other hand is entirely personal. The stickers are imbued with nothing other than a fleeting fragment of personality and for that alone I love them. Every time I encounter those little, smiling, anonymous faces I am struck by how elusive personality really is despite all those careful market analyses and buyer profiles. It would seem that individualism, even when replicated and advertised in a public forum, is not dead after all.

Red nail polish must be undeniably hip considering that Revlon is now marketing green polish to the masses. Of course, most people don't know this yet which means that all those mall kids sporting their Urban Decay shades don't seem to understand that in actuality I really am cooler than they are. All of which brings up that quintessential "coolness" problem regarding the almost indiscernible difference between being ironically retro and utterly clueless. Not that I care or anything.