ever-fixed mark

This is my Blackberry.

There are many like it, but this one is mine.

My Blackberry is my best friend. It is my life. I must master the controls as i mster my lifeM

(The helll…? What’s the difference between Alt and Num on this thing? Where is the Shift? Why can’t I move the cursor without deleting the whole line?)

My Blackberry without me is useless. Without my Blackberry, I am useless.

I must check my Blackberry every time the blinking light alerts me to a message.

I must blog, check the weather, Google stock prices, and look up obscure facts in Wikipedia at random times during the day, just because I can.

My Blackberry is human, even as I, because it is my life.

Thus, I will learn it as a brother.

I will learn its weaknesses, its strengths, its applications, its accessories, its shortcuts, and its themes.

I will ever guard it against the ravages of loose change and drops from great height.

I will keep my Blackberry charged and ready, even as I am charged and ready.

We will become part of each other. We will…

Before God I swear this creed.

After five long days at my new job, I was awarded a well-deserved holiday, and not a moment too soon. And if we can only persuade the Kenyans to run the Boston Marathon on a regular basis, then I’ll be able to maintain this delightful schedule of five days on, three days off.

What to do with my day off? Well, now that I have developed a number of rolls of 120 film, I have been thinking about branching out to 35mm. I decided to take advantage of the fine weather to shoot a roll with Husband’s pinhole camera, which I haven’t used for over two years, according to the post. So I dragged out the tripod and headed out to the salt marsh.

Pinhole cameras are the lowest of the low tech. There is only one aperture setting; shutter speed is controlled by your steady hand and “one Mississippi, two Mississippi”; and there is no viewfinder for framing the shot, so you just point the box at your (preferably still) subject and hope for the best.

Landscape photography is not really my thing, but it was fun to try something different. Voilà:

These steps lead down from an observation post at the wildlife sanctuary. We’re still waiting for leaves here in New England. The film was overexposed, so I did a bit of adjusting on the computer. This shot looks completely different on three different computer monitors, so I’m not sure what it looks like for you.

Et voici:

See what I mean about being unable to frame the shot? This condemned shack sits alongside the only route to the island. “No evacuation possible” refers to the fact that if the road washes out in an emergency, the islanders will be swimming for it. “Got KI?” is a reminder to keep a supply of potassium iodide on hand, in case there is a nuclear accident severe enough to pose a threat of thyroid cancer, but not so severe that you’d be instant toast, in which case the KI wouldn’t do much good. Potassium iodide is something of a local obsession — the emergency response calendars they hand out every year remind you to get some, and if you send your kids to public school you have to sign a permission slip authorizing the school nurse to administer it. I think the pinhole effect adds a nice apocalyptic aura to the picture.

The pinhole experiment was so much fun, I find myself thinking, “How low can I go?” How can I push the boundaries of photographic technology even further…back? Then I saw this article in the New York Times and immediately though, “That’s going to be my next camera.”

Yet another book that the George W. Bush Presidential Library will have to forego, thanks to my efforts.

This week was a squeaker, though. I was eating less than I thought humanly possible, but the pounds just weren’t dropping. I think my habit of eating dinner late has been working against me, so I made an effort to eat earlier and cut down on the sodium the last two days. That’s one change I find it difficult to make. We really like having our dinner in peace after the boys go to bed, when we can enjoy it. Now that I’m commuting to work and eating my other two meals in meetings, I hate to give up the single relaxed meal of the day.

My intention to leave my job with a modicum of dignity and minimum of recriminations has been derailed by a Series of Unfortunate Events. They range from the mildly irritating (they took me out to lunch and stuck ME with the tab!) to the borderline criminal (my check has gone astray for the fourth month in a row). But for some strange reason, the thing that sticks in my craw is that they’re intercepting and reading my e-mail.

How did I discover this? No, it was not a case of cyber detective work, a la The Cuckoo’s Egg. (Did you ever read that? I think that’s when I realized I was a Geek in Embryo.) I sit on an industry committee, and the chair sent me an e-mail invitation to the next teleconference, accidentally using my old work e-mail as well as the personal e-mail I had asked her to use. One of my former colleagues read it and then forwarded it back to me, directing me to tell her that he would sit on this committee in my place.

I know that corporations are typically authorized to monitor Internet traffic and read corporate e-mail, although I’m not certain that applies to my situation, as I was not a regular employee and our company never stated any such policy. I have never heard of an e-mail account being kept open after termination, though. Husband says that in the past he has been asked to handle messages for a departed employee, but in my experience the account is closed and a bounce-back message directs the sender to contact another person.

What irks me the most it that my colleague thought it was appropriate to usurp my position on the committee. I explained as politely as I could that it doesn’t work that way; the committee invited me to join, not a random representative from Company X, and my place is not entailed on Company X in as if it were a piece of property in nineteenth-century England.

I hope they are having fun reading all the e-mails that the dog-walking group, Consumer Reports, and the Mothers’ Club are still mistakenly sending to my old work address. If my colleague wants to take my spot on the Playgroup Committee, he’s welcome to it.

On a Friday night when Husband has been out of town all week, I like to treat the boys and myself to a pajama party with pizza and a movie. It’s always a struggle to get a children’s movie that I find palatable, so sometimes I change it up and get a grown-up movie that I think they might like. Musicals have been the most reliable resource. Right now, The Music Man is a big hit with the boys. I haven’t seen it for years, and I remembered it as kind of dull, but it has every element a small boy could ask for: Steam train! Small children dancing and singing! Marching bands! I had forgotten how terrifically syncopated most of the music is, too.

I also rented High School Musical, the better to understand what music those crazy kids are listening to these days. The movie wasn’t nearly as bad as I expected. The plot involves a basketball player who breaks out of his social circle to audition for the lead in the high school musical and then falls in love with his leading lady. It took me some time to realize that this plot had been ripped from the annals of my own high school experience.

When I was in ninth grade, the “freshmen” were housed in the junior high school; high school was grades 10 - 12 only. (This seems to be the earliest in a series of American educational experiments to reconfigure schools to keep the younger kids away from the pernicious influence of the older ones.) The ninth graders were allowed to try out for some sports and for the high school musical. That year, it was Bye Bye Birdie. The ‘fifties were all the rage in the ’seventies; we just loved wearing saddle shoes and poodle skirts and pretending to live in a time with more formal social rules.

The director of the musical had taken pains to recruit some real live boys (not drama geeks) to fill the three male lead roles. This was terribly exciting. The drama geeks were perfectly nice guys, but it was thrilling to meet older boys we would typically be terrified to talk to. Also, having males who were known outside of theater circles associated with our musical gave it a real legitimacy.

Hugo was played by a funny curly-haired boy. The only thing I remember about him is that he was one of four brothers; one brother was named Paul Newman and was a running back on the football team. The lead, Al (the Dick Van Dyke role in the movie) was played by a senior boy, one of those kids who got good grades, was involved in every sort of activity, and was a friend to everyone. His girlfriend, who was part of the chorus, had just broken up with him, and he was a tragic figure to us freshman. He went into a funk every time the song “Crazy Love” played on the radio.

The pièce de casting résistance, though, was Conrad. The director found this tall, dark, sweet-but-dumb tough guy who had probably never participated in an extracurricular activity in his life. He looked like a young John Travolta (back then, John Travolta still was a young John Travolta), and he was terrified of making a fool of himself. His girlfriend had been enlisted to accompany him to rehearsals to make sure he didn’t run away, but his head was soon turned by the screams of delight accompanying him from the chorus as he sang “One Last Kiss,” not all of which were put on. He was an absolutely perfect Conrad Birdie.

Like the girl in A Chorus Line, I could never really sing, so I was lucky to get the part of Sad Girl #1, who (silently) dances with Al to “Put on a Happy Face.” My best friend, another ninth grader, walked away with Rosie, the female lead. This was a shocker to the high school population. Ninth graders were supposed to be chorus and stage hands. She was the most qualified for the role, though, and eventually she earned the respect of the company.

Over the weeks of rehearsal, Rosie slowly fell in love with Al, who was still pining over his chorus girl. My best friend and I discussed this state of affairs for about two hours a day in telephone calls after rehearsals. Would Al ever be able to tear himself away from his ex’s memory? Even if he could, would a senior date (gasp) a freshman? We were soon prevailing upon Al to run us back and forth to MacDonald’s for the dinner break in his little green Bug. This alone was enough excitement to fuel my diary for weeks on end, but I was also suffering unrequited love vicariously through my friend. The rehearsal where Rosie and Al practiced their kissing scene was closed to everyone but them, the director, and me. He had already dropped me off after the cast party when he drove her home and kissed her for the first time “out of character,” but I still know every detail so well that I might as well have been in the back seat.

How sad. My first big role in a High School Romance, and I played not the ingenue, but the sidekick.

It looks like the George W. Bush Presidential Library will be short a few books and periodicals, because I made my goal of 2 pounds with a couple of ounces to spare.

This approach seems to be working, not necessarily because I despise GWB so much, but because having a short-term goal really discourages cheating. If I vow to lose ten pounds, well then, I’ll get started on that right after I finish this sundae; but knowing I have to be down two pounds by Wednesday really clarifies my thinking.

We’ll see what happens when I start work next week and am unable to continue with my current exercise regimen.

I bet George W. Bush that I could lose 10 pounds by my sister-in-law’s wedding.

Ask me how!

Gimmicky? Sure. Easy enough to cheat? Absolutely. But it does seem to be having an effect. Because the lovely people at stickk.com are holding some of my hard-earned money, I am thinking twice about what I am eating.

I will keep you posted next Wednesday, my first check-in date — just success or failure — no boring diet analyses.

I was invited to New York for my sister-in-law’s bridal shower this weekend. Ultimately I decided that the cheapest and easiest course would be for me to fly down and back the same day, leaving the boys at home. I was a bit nervous about attending a function with Husband’s family without Husband in attendance, primarily because of my imperfect understanding of the in-laws’ classification system for conversational topics. It goes something like this:

Unclassified: Open for discussion; suitable for children and the elderly.

Restricted: Discuss only with relatives of similar religious/political bent.

Secret: Everyone knows about it, but we don’t talk about it.

Top secret: It would be easier for everyone if we kept it from your mother-in-law.

The problem with this system is that classifications are not always clearly communicated. For example, no where on the shower invitation did it state, “Surprise!” and yet, as I found out yesterday, it was indeed intended to be so. (Luckily my sister-in-law did not hear me when I said to her on the phone earlier this week, “See you Sunday at the shower!”)

Moving from sitcom territory into the fertile ground of soap operas, in the past three years there have been TWO secret marriages and ONE secret divorce in this family. Every time the door opens I expect Husband’s presumed-dead twin to walk through the door with a handgun and a cache of diamonds.

As you can imagine, I’m terrified to say more than “Hello” and “How are you?” to my mother-in-law. The truth always outs, just like on “General Hospital,” but I don’t want to be the one to break any big secrets. It seems to me that we could avoid all the drama by being open about our lives in the first place.

But that reminds me…if you see my mother-in-law, could you please not mention to her that the boys haven’t been baptized? I am not the one who told her that the “nuns in Korea” administered the sacrament, but since she already believes it, it would probably be better for all concerned if we didn’t disabuse her of the notion.