That's the beautiful man in the photograph

Didn't want to make you fell like you have defend yourself, just wanted to turn it around and shitpost. But yeah, she rarely does.

I was also lowkey referencing the famous photo caption from am interview with "Amal Clooney, famous and successful lawyer and human rights activist, and her husband, an actor". Referring to a certain George.

No, that's not really a useful way of modeling it for the case of light traveling through a linear medium.

The absorption/re-emission model implicitly localizes the photons, which is problematic

think about it in an uncertainty principle (or diffraction limit) picture: it implies that the momentum is highly uncertain, which means that the light would get absorbed but re-emitted in every direction, which doesn't happen. So instead you can make arguments about it being a delocalized photon and being absorbed and re-emitted coherently across the material, but this isn't really the same thing as the "ping pong balls stopping and starting again" model.

Another problem is to ask why the light doesn't change color in a (linear) medium

because if it's getting absorbed and re-emitted, and is not hitting a nice absorption line, why wouldn't it change energy by exchanging with the environment/other degrees of freedom? (The answer is it does do this

it's called Raman scattering, but that is generally a very weak effect.)

The absorption/emission picture does work for things like fluorescence. But Maxwell's equations, the Schrödinger equation, QED

these are wave equations.

Light is never late, nor is it early, it arrives precisely when it means to.

Dispersion and nonlinearities would like to have a word ;)

And why pirates drink coffee. "Boo, tea!" they cry

Light is generally better modeled by a wave, so I would say the wave doesn't experience time. Photons are the smallest unit of energy that can be transferred between a light wave and a different particle. They have momentum and direction, but they don't really travel exactly. They just mediate the force between light waves and matter.

Worded differently, a fermion (massive particle) within an electromagnetic (light) wave with a frequency of f may absorb some multiple of h x f joules of energy, where h is a very small constant. There is no way for the wave to transfer less than hf joules to the particle at a time. There is no need to think of photons as anything other than the smallest possible quantization of the electromagnetic wave rather than a particle of light. There's no need to think of it existing for any amount of time or space.