I am a person that likes to change my desktop background picture on a regular basis, but I did not realize until a few weeks ago how much it actually tells you about yourself and your interests in life.
I have probably 20 desktop background pictures saved to my computer, and the one that I currently have up is a photo of myself in a neighborhood called Locust Point in Baltimore, Maryland.
Locust Point is where my family is originally from, and I recently had the opportunity to travel back to Baltimore for a visit.
Before that, my desktop background was a photo of Bass Hall, the opera house in Fort Worth, Texas that I go to twice a year during the opera festival each spring. The picture is of one of the decorations on the facade of the building in which an angel is blowing a horn.
Another of my desktop background pictures is of a piece of artwork by Salvador Dali called The Persistence of Memory. I had that background up for a long time, because it is my favorite painting of all time and one that I look at on a regular basis.
I have desktop background pictures of myself at Texas Stadium, where the Dallas Cowboys used to play, and Camden Yards, the Baltimore Orioles' baseball park. In the first one, I am standing next to a statue of Tom Landry, the great long-time coach of the Cowboys. In the second picture, I am standing next to a statue of Babe Ruth, who was actually born in Baltimore.
Another background picture that I have is of the great Greco-Roman wrestler Alexander Karelin, throwing an opponent from Japan. As a former wrestler myself, I have always greatly admired Karelin, and when I saw that it was a good fit for my desktop background, I decided to put it into the rotation.
A few months ago, I happened to sit down and look at all of my desktop background pictures and started to notice how much they all told me about my life. There in front of me, one after another, were the things that meant the most to me in life, and whether subconsciously or not, I think I was was trying to project that to the rest of the world.
I don't think that there is anything wrong with that, necessarily, but I did wonder why I had chosen so many things like that when I see other people who do not have desktop background pictures at all or have something that means very little to them, if anything.
I suppose that it is just a matter of personal choice, but the desktop background pictures I use seem to be an expression of my life, and I have taken great care to illustrate that fact. I tried using a background for a few weeks of a landscape photo, but I eventually took it down because it just did not feel right.