ever-fixed mark

Wow! It worked!

You really can learn anything you need to know from a book!

I won’t give you a primer on the process, but in order to understand the obstacles I faced you need to grasp that there are two main phases in developing film: loading and chemistry. Loading involves moving the film from the tightly-wound cassette (for 35 mm) or spool (120) to a plastic or stainless steel reel that leaves space within the spirals for the developer and other chemicals. You have to unspool the film, load it onto the reel, and put it into the developing tank in total darkness. If you’ve ever seen a movie scene set in a darkroom, it’s not the kind of “dark” where there’s a red light that allows you to see a little of what’s going on. It has to be pitch black. If you don’t have a completely dark room you can use a changing bag, a small lightproof canvas bag with holes for your arms. You put all the equipment in the bag, put your hands through the holes, and then perform all the necessary operations inside the bag without being able to see what you’re doing.

I tried this first out in the open with the old reel of film that was in my camera when I bought it. It took me about 15 minutes to figure out what I was doing. The film was hard to work with. It kept jumping off the spool or slipping out one side as soon as I’d gotten it threaded on the other.

I then tried it with my eyes closed and found it utterly impossible without the visual cues. So I tried to re-learn the process again using tactile cues. I noted how the flanges felt when the spool was lined up properly, tried to memorize the feel of my hand position when I was lining up the film, and so forth. I was feeling very Zen about adjusting my learning style to fit the situation.

It didn’t work.

So I took a few deep breaths, and I thought, “What would a yogi do?” And then I had this weird idea to try to visualize the film being loaded on the spool properly in my head while I was loading it in the bag. And it just leapt onto the reel.

I was very nervous about trying it with my first roll of actual film. I had shot a sacrifice roll of Dog playing in the snow that I wouldn’t be heartbroken about losing, just in case I screwed it up. I arranged all my materials, put my hands in the bag, and tried to visualize the film going onto the spool. I had a few false starts, but then it seemed to work perfectly. Of course, I still couldn’t see the film, because it was encased in the tank. I wouldn’t know if I had screwed up until I had gone through an hour of pouring chemicals in and out of the tank and agitating the tank back and forth.

The wonderful thing about that process is that you really have to focus in order to do it. Each step is timed, and you’re never sitting around; you need to agitate the tank or tap it to release the air bubbles or count down the seconds to the next cycle. You need to focus on exactly what needs to be done at every moment or risk losing your film, at best, or chemical burns, at worst. So there is no multitasking in the darkroom. After an hour I emerged with adequately-developed negatives, and I realized that my mind had not wandered once.

I tried my luck with a second roll and then scanned all my negatives with my new scanner. This was the best of the bunch:

(And how cute is that?)

All I wanted for Christmas was for some elves to clean out my basement so I could set up a darkroom. When that didn’t happen (lazy f***ing elves), I came to the realization that I could actually have my darkroom without benefit of dark or room. With a changing bag, I could unroll the film anywhere, and if I scanned my negatives instead of printing them, I didn’t even need a permanent space. I could set up a temporary developing station in my kitchen! So I ran out to a photo supply store and, with various Christmas gift cards, bought everything I needed to develop film and then produce digital images from it.

(Husband: “I don’t understand. Couldn’t you accomplish the same thing with this digital camera?”)

So to prepare for developing my first roll, I did some reading: “Toxic chemicals blah blah blah…allergic reactions blah blah blah…small children…spills…ventilation blah blah blah….contamination of food…” and I eventually deduced that the kitchen was not going to be the best place for my darkroom, if for no other reason than it is continuously occupied from 6:00 a.m. until midnight each day.

So I cleaned the basement.

After three hours of separating, bagging, organizing, etc. I decided the best course of action would be to make one room of the basement the trash room and organize the stuff I was keeping in two of the other rooms, clearing out the fourth room for the darkroom. Six hours later, the fruits of my labors were thus. Here is the (no exaggeration) small mountain of trash in the trash room.

The depth is hard to perceive in this photo, but the room is about 10 feet from the door, where I took the photo, to the enormous water pump (for a sprinkler system, no longer in use). I am almost physically ill when I think of the waste inherent in this pile. Clothes that are sort of good but not really, books that would be desirable if not destroyed from years of storage in poor conditions, curtains from old houses that don’t fit the current windows, pieces of toys….CRAP. CLUTTER. I will try to do better in 2008.

But along with the trash, there were some treasures.

Our fourth kitchen chair! We were wondering what happened to it.

A metal pencil sharpener, one of two permanently installed in the house. The previous owners obviously valued sharp pencil points. Aitch is fascinated with them. Eight computers in the house, and he’s entranced by the pencil sharpener.

Wall ‘O Nails! A different nail for every occasion! Check out the vintage coffee cans.

And…one painfully groovy rug.

Hey! Wanna come over to my basement and listen to records and read “Tiger Beat”?

Contrast this scene with the view pre-cleanup to see what nine hours of work looks like.

I’ll post my first photos when I have them.

As I was shopping today, I spotted this magazine cover:

The feature story, in case you can’t read the fine print, is “Run, Jump, Skip and More: Keys to mastering motor skills.”

I’m picturing a literate three-year-old leafing through this at the doctor’s office, maybe attaching a sticky note for future reference, and musing, “Ah, step THEN hop! I’ll definitely try that out on the playground next time.”

We Portions (Port City denizens) are not too fashion-conscious. It’s perfectly acceptable to tool around town looking like you just stepped off the beach or your boat. In winter, especially, all caution is thrown to the winds (out of the nor’east, gusting to 40 mph). You wear whatever gets you through the day. No one’s looking at you anyway. They can’t see, what with the hat, goggles, and scarf obscuring their vision.

In my rarefied social circle, functional winter outerwear is referred to as a “dog-walking coat.” Ostensibly, a dog-walking coat is an old but warm and waterproof coat you throw on to walk the dog in the salt marsh, but in reality you see a lot of dog-walking coats walking around town sans dog. My dog-walking coat, a bilious green down jacket covered in dog drool and lollipop spit, might also be my grocery-shopping coat or even my going-out-to-dinner coat on days when winter has just ground me down to an apathetic lump.

For years I have been eyeing, with a mixture of horror and envy, one particular dog-walking coat sported by several human members of my dog play group. It’s like the X-treme dog-walking coat; every essential quality (warmth, comfort, indestructibility, color and texture that allow dog hair to blend in) is included to the max. It is a full-length down coat in a utilitarian brown or matte black, with a large, fake fur-trimmed hood, made by that arbiter of style, L.L. Bean. Basically, it’s a down comforter with sleeves.

I finally broke down and bought one.

I wore it for the first time to the gym yesterday, accompanied by my pink not-Ugg boots, the ones that look like bedroom slippers. I looked like a flu sufferer who had just arisen from bed, pulling the covers with her for warmth, to go heat up some chicken soup in the kitchen. In short, I was ridiculous. But a winter storm sprang up while I was on the treadmill, and the whole time I spent digging out the car, driving to the grocery store, loading and unloading the bags, etc. I was as warm and toasty as if I were in bed.

(The dog also has a dog-walking coat, but his is quite stylish.)

My friends, this is a bona fide disability:

There should be federal funding available to have a home health aide visit my house during the holidays to assist with presents.

The Educational Testing Service ought to be required to give me two extra weeks on the calendar to get ready for Christmas.

The fact that there is no commercially-available medication to alleviate my suffering should be occasion for public shaming of Big Pharma.

Last week, while Minor was in school, I took Aitch to a coffeeshop for a little hot chocolate and some one-on-one bonding time. There was a large group of people holding a meeting in the center of the room while we were there. After about five minutes, Aitch said, “I don’t like those people! They’re mean!”

“Why are they mean?” I asked.

“They’re talking and laughing! They’re laughing at me! That’s not nice!”

This is something new for Aitch, who for the first four years of his life was so insensitive to slights physical and emotional that I worried that his nerve endings didn’t reach all the way to his epidermis. Now a strong wind pains him physically, and a sideways glance hurts his feelings. “They’re not laughing at you,” I said. “They’re just having fun, just like we are doing. See, we’re laughing, and we’re not being mean.”

But he didn’t want to be jollied out of his bad mood. “Don’t do that!” he said. “I want to be…mad face!”

“All right,” I said. “Show me your mad face.”

Then he turned his head to the side, like some Broadway hopeful getting himself in character for the big audition. Head averted, he arranged his face into a Mask of Fury and then turned it on me full force.

I burst into laughter because OH MY GOD WHERE DID HE LEARN THAT? Has he been sneaking downstairs at night to watch reruns of “Inside the Actor’s Studio”?

When I picked myself up off the floor, I asked him to do it again. Each time he performed the same head-turning trick before showing me the mad face. My little Method actor.

And…..scene.

Massachusetts is light-years behind the rest of the country when it comes to gym culture. The first gym I ever joined here, in Cambridge, was a huge cold dirty warehouse crammed with universal weights and treadmills. The locker room was unspeakable. I’ve worked in inner-city schools with more ambiance.

The next gym I joined, near my office, was in the bottom floor of another office park, and felt like the health club version of a cube farm. The rooms were about six and a half feet high and the whole thing was fluorescently lit. Whenever I climbed up onto the treadmill, I felt like I was about to burst right through the drop ceiling.

When we moved to Port City, I joined the local gym. It was cozier than the warehouse and roomier than the cube farm. But the treadmills on the first floor only went up to 6 miles an hour (!). There were limited entertainment options in the cardio room, just two big-screen TVs with the audio blaring through an antiquated PA system. The water pressure in the showers was flaccid. Every class I took was off somehow; one time, someone left a yoga class early, and the instructor bitched, “I always knew she didn’t like me.” Namaste to you, too.

This year, I was motivated by the extended renovations to and subsequent closure of the YWCA pool to check out a gym across the river. Swimming is one of the best ways for the kids to get exercise in the winter months, and I was dreading a season without a pool. And the new gym was much nicer, although not anywhere near the amenity levels of the health clubs I belonged to in Chicago almost a decade ago. There are enough parking spots, though, and the treadmills go up to 7.5 miles an hour (maybe higher; that’s as far as I go). The locker room is comfortable. The workout rooms are nice. And there are TVs everywhere, although I’m not sure if that’s a plus or minus. Almost all of the cardio machines have individual TVs, with personal audio hook-ups, and there are additional screens in all the rooms with closed-captioning, if you prefer to listen to music while you watch/read television, like I do. Sometimes I feel the information overload is a little much, but then again, running indoors is boring, and a little trash TV really helps to pass the time.

Unfortunately, as I recently discovered, the TV reception in the club is confined to six channels: The NFL network, ESPN 1, ESPN2, the Sci-Fi channel, CNN, and some kind of advertising channel for the club that also has videos on it. Why would anyone assume that just because someone wants to play sports, that they like to watch them on TV? I certainly don’t, and since “Battlestar Galactica” was not playing on the Sci-Fi channel, I was forced to watch Christine Amanpour’s depressing report on orphans in Africa. I believe my feelings about watching CNN on the treadmill have been well-documented here, so I won’t elaborate, except to say that I would prefer some more diverting entertainment. Since about 80% of the population of the cardio room was female, I don’t know why the programming was so skewed to the male demographic.

As I was leaving, I noticed another room off the main cardio room. It had some cardio machines, a few weight machines, free weights, and (of course) five televisions mounted on the wall. It was separated from the cardio area from a glass wall, and I wondered what was special about this collection of equipment. Then I saw the plaque:

Women Only.

Hmmm. Women Only. How do I feel about that?

On one hand, I have a few female friends who say they don’t like working out in the same room with men, and most of them have joined a women-only gym as a result. Some say they feel intimidated by men who seem to know more about weight machines or exercises than they do. Some have complained about the unsightliness or unsoundliness (”all the grunting!”) of men at workout. Personally none of these things bothers me, and it is also quite a while since I have had to worry about men hitting on me at the gym. But I suppose I can see their point, and it does seem like a savvy marketing ploy on the part of this health club to compete with Curves.

On the other hand, at this crucial juncture in feminist history, is it really the time to start re-segregating? Today’s amenity is tomorrow’s ghetto, and once the gyms start instituting purdah, we’re on the slippery slope to A Handmaid’s Tale. And I think it might be hard to run in a burqa. If you’re intimidated by men at the gym, shouldn’t you just do a few more push-ups and get over it? And the gym doesn’t escape responsibility, either: shouldn’t they take pains to make the whole place welcoming to both sexes? (I suppose we won’t have really arrived at gender equality until not only the workout rooms but also the locker rooms are unisex, like on “Battlestar Galactica.” Speaking of…we’ve just started the third season, and, whoa! Starbuck wouldn’t ask for a women’s only room; she would just kill any man who looked sideways at her during a workout. But I digress.)

On the third hand (as my students used to say)…to what channels are the TVs in the “women only” room tuned? I’ll report back.

Aitch was never one of those very routine-bound two-year-olds. He wouldn’t freak if you did anything out of order or omitted some cherished ritual. He never became overly attached to any transitional objects. Sure, there were intermittent Gordon or fuzzy blankie obsessions, but if Gordon were temporarily lost or fuzzy blankie in the wash it was no BFD. He was just kind of easy-going all around, fairly distractable, always willing to be bribed. I’m not saying that he never threw a hissy fit, but as a two-year-old, he never had that kind of hair-trigger temper that leaves some parents mentally calculating levels of fatigue and calorie intake before attempting any kind of activity with their child. So we got through the Terrible Twos relatively unscathed.

Everyone told me, “Three is worse than two! That’s when they get really willful and the tantrums start!” but I never noticed any ramp-up. When Aitch celebrated his fourth birthday this summer, then, I really thought we were out of the woods. Because four is a great age! Four is reason, board games, letters, numbers, imagination. Right?

Well, no. Suddenly, Aitch has become the terrible two-year-old I never had. At least once a day, sometimes three or four times, he flies into a rage when thwarted. Tiredness and hunger seem to be triggers, typical for a two-year-old, but not typical of two-year-old Aitch and something I think he would have gotten past as a four-year-old. This has surprised me perhaps more than any other development. Why is he acting out like this, now? How could he regress so much?

Coincidentally, Minor has suddenly become Mr. Tractable. He loves to play independently, shrugs off “no,” can always be distracted with a game or a story. He sometimes throws two-year-old tantrums, but he gets over them very quickly when we ignore him. Maybe this isn’t such a coincidence. My theory is that Aitch’s regressive behavior has kicked in because it’s finally starting to sink in that Minor is competition. Minor’s been around for awhile, but until recently he’s been the baby. Now he’s communicating, running around, even recognizing letters and memorizing songs — until recently, Aitch’s bailiwick. Aitch has always been very sensitive to Minor’s special baby status (suffering beat-downs from him, for example, but rarely striking back); it makes sense to me that any anger he has toward Minor would be expressed indirectly, but what do I know? It could be allergies or eczema or attachment disorder or, most likely, demonic possession.

At first, I tried ignoring the tantrums, just like we do with Minor. Aitch would just continue to rage, though, and unlike Minor he can follow us around repeating his complaint or demand. Also, as Husband noted, most of the time tantrums strike, we really need him to do something, like put on his shoes to go to school; it’s not always feasible to walk away. So then I tried reasoning with him, although that just seemed to prolong the incident. Even worse, I would get drawn into an argument and then found myself getting angry. Soon he would throw a tantrum and I would find myself getting furious immediately, which didn’t help matters.

Then I moved on to a cognitive approach. When Aitch started screaming, I would touch him on the shoulder and explain that I needed him to use words like a big four-year-old boy to tell me what’s wrong. I told him he could cry if he was sad but that screaming was not acceptable. Then I would tell him how I wanted to behave: calm down, take a breath, put on your own socks, etc. This worked somewhat, at least breaking the cycle of screaming/anger.

Now I am combining the extinction and cognitive approaches. When he starts screaming I don’t remonstrate; I just turn my back, indicating that I don’t negotiate with emotional terrorists. When he calms down enough to start complaining in a normal tone of voice, I talk to him, but as soon as it escalates to shrieking I’m deaf and dumb again. When he’s calm I remind him of how he is expected to behave, and if I need him to do something I remind him of that compliance = reward, whereas resistance = nothing. Rewards are things like TV time in the evening, dessert, etc. I am less comfortable with the “consequences” (read: bribes) portion of the program, but it works as long as the rewards are everyday ones and not special treats. I’m not giving him candy to get dressed, in other words.

The important part seems to be allowing him a way to save face if he goes over the edge. The goal is to avoid a tantrum, but he can’t “lose” automatically if he loses his shit; at that point the goal has to be that he can recover his equilibrium. He can’t do that if I’m angry with him, I’ve realized. I am trying to work on responding neutrally. For some reason, I find this really easy with Minor, but not so much with Aitch, because I feel that he should be over this now.

Yesterday, for example, he started fussing when I asked him to get dressed. In the past I have tried to leave the room during the fussing part, but he always pleads with me to stay with him, and I think “that sounds reasonable” and then he stalls and I get angry and try to hurry him along and he cries and yuck. So yesterday I told him, “I’m going to set the timer for ten minutes, and when it goes off I expect you to be dressed. If you’re not dressed then I will come up here and dress you, but then you get no TV privileges tonight.” Now, I have really resisted being The Mother Who Sets the Timer for Everything, because I would like my kid to grow up to be able to brush his teeth without a Pavlovian tick tick tick tick DING! accompanying his every move, but I walked down to the kitchen and set the microwave timer. This way, I thought, if he cries and screams I won’t be around to see it or exacerbate it; and if I end up getting him dressed myself, there will be consequences. Either way, he would be dressed in eleven minutes or less, which was what I really needed to get out of the deal, while still feeling like I was helping to move him toward some kind of independence.

There was silence from him room for eight minutes. Then a little bit of thumping. I figured he was playing. At nine minutes, he came downstairs wearing pants and socks and carrying his shirt. “Do this for me!” he demanded, and I told him he had to do it himself, and quick, before the timer went off. He managed to put it on, backwards. I helped him right it, and he finished with thirty seconds to spare.

He was so proud.

I won’t say that it’s been all puppies and daisies since, but he seems to be having fewer tantrums and recovering from the ones he does have a bit more quickly. I hope it sticks, because I’m running out of psychological approaches and I don’t want to have to start administering the electric shocks.