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.

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.

A few months ago I got a cold that lingered in the form of a horrible dry cough. It was a constant tickle in the back of my throat and a squeezing of my esophagus that made me feel like I couldn’t breathe. After two sleepless weeks, I went to the doctor.

“There are a number of viruses that cause this,” she said, “and one bacterium. On the off chance it’s the bacterium, I’ll give you a course of antibiotics. If it’s the bacterium it will clear up right away, and if it’s a virus you’ll have to suffer for a bit, but eventually it will go away.”

I took the first antibiotic pill. Within an hour I started feeling better. Within a day it had cleared up completely.

About a month later, I got the same symptoms, which I found out were also known as “walking pneumonia.” I tried to tough it out for a few weeks but eventually went back to the doctor, explained that the antibiotics had been effective before, and got another course, with the same rapid and efficacious result.

Only a week or so later, though, the tickle came back. I was in Florida for the weekend and decided that this time I wouldn’t wait. I called the practice and got the on-call doctor, whose last name is difficult to pronounce and therefore always refers to himself by his first name. “This is Dr. Steve,” he said (not his real name), and I thought, uh-oh, because it would have been so much easier to explain to the regular doc.

But I tried: walking pneumonia, antibiotics worked like a charm two times, I’m in Florida, could he call me in a prescription? “Well, 98% of the time these things are viral infections,” he said.

“Yes, I know, but the last two times for me it’s been bacterial,” I said.

“So you want to bet against medical science?”

I tried to explain that for me it was more like Pascal’s wager, except that no one has proven the existence of God, whereas plenty of people have proven the existence of bacteria.

“You know, if you’re getting repeated infections, it means your immune system has taken a hit. What are you doing to try to boost it?”

“I’m trying to sleep well and exercise, neither of which is possible when I’m coughing all the time.”

“There’s a homeopathic remedy that works on these viral infections most of the time, as long as you take it within a day of feeling sick. Write this down: [garbled]. It’s better than Airborne or Zicam.”

A homeopathic remedy! Why not leeches or nerve tonic or exorcism? Wait, has my uterus migrated elsewhere in my body, causing these symptoms? Maybe I need to have my humours balanced. What does my horoscope say?

I love that he’s all about “medical science” when it comes to the diagnosis, but not the treatment.

So there I was at a sushi restaurant in Park City on Saturday night when I heard what sounded like my mobile phone’s ring, but I didn’t feel the accompanying vibration. “Is that my phone?” I wondered out loud. The woman at the table next to me said, “No, it’s mine,” and when I looked at her I realized she was an old acquaintance of mine. It was the woman whose annotations had enlivened my reading of the book Mating.

The last time I saw her was in Paris six or seven years ago, and when I was there last month I stayed in a hotel near her old apartment. As I passed that street I thought, “I really should Google her and see what she’s doing,” and then I promptly forgot about it until I saw her in the restaurant. The odds of us meeting at some random spot midway between our respective coasts are probably astronomical, but then again when you travel as much as I do it’s probably stranger that I haven’t met more old friends (and candidates for President) out and about.

My little Ethan Frome added yet another bump/bruise to his collection when he fell against the television at his babysitter’s house yesterday. This morning, as I started to take him to school, he wailed that he didn’t want to go because he was afraid everyone would “talk about my bruise.”

I don’t think he really felt that way — he is typically squarely in the “any attention is good attention” camp — but on Monday I had stupidly tried to prepare him for the fact that everyone would exclaim over his beat-up face, so I think he thought it was an appropriate pretext for drama.

As I asked the teacher, once again, not to make too big a deal over his injury, I’m sure I saw her mentally composing the e-mail to DSS. It’s a good thing there were witnesses for both these injuries.

Meanwhile, I’m celebrating Leap Day by leaping off to Utah for some skiing, just ahead of the storm that’s going to bog down the East Coast.

I had a wonderful day in Paris yesterday, truncated though it was. I had intended to spend a few hours in the Louvre, but after walking from my hotel down the Champs d’Elysee to the Tuileries in the bright, bright sunshine, I couldn’t bear to go inside. I kept walking, on to Notre Dame and then over the river to hang out in St. Germain on the left bank.

One of the churches I checked out, Saint-Nicolas-du-Chardonnet (right across the street from Saint-Etienne-du-Cabernet) was advertising a special mass that evening in honor of the miracle at Lourdes. February 11, 2008 was the one hundred fifty year anniversary, to the day, of the first Virgin Mary sighting. The celebration would feature a Latin mass sung by a choir, followed by a procession of flaming torches throughout the streets. Well! Flambeaux! How could I resist?

I am no stranger to the French mass. When I was in the Peace Corps, church on Sunday was my regular French lesson. (Such useful phrases: “la paix du Christ,” “le sang de l’Agneau,” “Seigneur,” “aux siècles des siècles.”) At this point in my life, it’s safe to say I’ve attended more French masses than English ones. It’s been a long time, though. I was a little late to the church, and as I settled in I saw something that amazed me: many women, perhaps as many as ten or twenty percent of the female communicants, had covered their heads. Some wore lace mantillas, but others had regular scarves wrapped around their hair, hijab-style. They were not all old ladies, either. In my row there were three women under 35 with scarves tied under their chins. I don’t think I’ve seen that in church in thirty-five years. Has this custom never died out on the Continent, or is there a nouvelle vague of Catholic fundamentalism in France?

Attending Mass made me recall what is seductive about religion. There is a comforting sense of community that comes from enacting rituals in unison with other people. Not exactly in unison — there seemed to be different opinions on sit vs. stand vs. kneel for much of the service. Plenty of people knelt, though, and there were no cushioned pries-dieux, only cold stone floor. (The Internets do not agree on that plural, by the way.) Still, there was something thrilling about all these people, young and old, black and white, European and not, coming together in this way.

I had to work hard to comprehend the homily, and that’s when this sense of community began to fade. The priest compared the pattern of apparitions at Lourdes to the pattern of the rosary. I believe he detailed each of the eighteen apparitions in turn. I was surprised, because I hadn’t realized that the clergy really took this stuff literally. I thought they just tolerated it as a salubrious metaphor that brought people to the Church. Suddenly I had the same feeling that I do while watching the characters on Battlestar Galactica perform their religious rites. It seemed so unreal to me that all — some? any? — of the people in the room really believed that Jesus’s mother visited a little girl in France almost two millennia after her death.

It’s especially hard to believe that French people believe that. Didn’t Mitt Romney just tell us in his concession speech that they’re utterly godless? “Europe is facing a demographic disaster. That is the inevitable product of weakened faith in the Creator, failed families, disrespect for the sanctity of human life and eroded morality…. I am convinced that unless America changes course, we will become the France of the 21st century.”

Cue the flambeaux!

Actually, it’s more like a day and a half because Air France cancelled my flight, the only daily non-stop between Boston and Charles de Gaulle, and consequently I got in much later than I had planned. Originally, they tried to send me via Detroit, the logic of which was presumably suggested by some inscrutable Zen koan: “You must go west to travel east.” When the Air France flight to Detroit was delayed, I was able to convince them to pony up for a flight on Alitalia, so I went to Paris via Milan’s Malpensa Airport.

(Doesn’t “Malpensa” sound like the name of a super arch-villainness in a comic book? “Malpensa! She plants evil thoughts into the minds of the Superheroes, fomenting suspicion and dissent!” Seriously, this is not a name that inspires confidence.)

I’m still marveling that there’s only one non-stop flight between Boston and Paris. Hub of the Universe, my ass. At this point, I’d settle for “hub of at least one major airline.”

Good morning, ma’am. This is the front desk with your six a.m wake-up call. It is currently 10 degrees outside. Have a wonderful day.

Dear Hyatt management,

You may want to reconsider the wake-up greeting for your Chicago area guests, at least until the weather turns.

Sincerely,

A cold guest

After landing in Chicago on Sunday night I struck up a conversation with my cab driver, hoping to practice my Arabic. He was Palestinian and told me that he wouldn’t be able to understand the Tunisian dialect, but his English was excellent and he held forth on a number of topics in that tongue.

“I don’t blame the Israelis for our problems,” he said. “Israelis, Palestinians — we’re all just trying to live our lives. We’re all being manipulated by our governments.”

Okay, I can buy that.

“Our governments lie to us. Like, there’s no such thing as 9/11, the Holocaust — these are stories the governments tell us to get us to act in a certain way.”

Wow…we’re not even on the tollway and already we have conspiracy theories on not one but two major historical events. If he denies the moon landing I may be able to complete my Taxi Driver Bingo Card.

I did not attempt to set him straight. In the first place, people who subscribe to totally irrational conspiracy theories do not listen to reason; but also, a guiding principle that has served me well is Don’t Piss Off a Strange Man with Whom You are Alone in a Car at Night.

Anyway, I find I have more tolerance for these kinds of arguments since living in Tunisia and suffering La Presse as the sole source of my daily news. The governments in Arab countries control news in a way that we Americans can’t even imagine. For example, on 9/12 I accessed the on-line version of La Presse to see how they were reporting the tragedy. The fall of the twin towers was front-page news, but there was no mention of the hijackers or Al Qaeda. It was reported like a particularly unfortunate air traffic control accident. It’s no wonder that the Tunisians or Palestinians don’t trust what the media dishes out.

Of course, we recognize that the American media are biased and, in many cases, influenced by the government, but at least the different media outlets present us with an array of different biases. If you triangulate between Fox News, CNN, and Jon Stewart you might arrive at some approximation of the truth. And we’re free to move around the country, ask questions, do research, post crazy conspiracy theories on the web, etc. without the government opening up a file on us.

Uh, right?

Anyway, we’re reading Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop for my book club, and I had to laugh at this description of How the News is Made, Western style, where government control is less of a danger than the journalist’s desire to create a story:

Why, once Jakes went out to cover a revolution in one of the Balkan capitals. He oveslept his carriage, woke up at the wrong station, didn’t know any different, got out, went straight to a hotel, and cabled off a thousand-word story about barricades in the streets, flaming chuches, machine guns answering the rattle of his typewriter as he wrote, a dead child, like a broken doll, spreadeagled in the roadway below his window — you know.

Well they were pretty surprised at his office, getting a story like that from the wrong country, but they trusted Jakes and splashed it in six national newspapers. That day every special in Europe got orders to rush to the new revolution. They arrived in shoals. Everything seemed quiet enough, but it was as much as their jobs were worth to say so, with Jakes filing a thousand words of blood and thunder a day. So they chimed in too. Government stocks dropped, financial panic, state of emergency declared, army mobilized, famine, mutiny — and in less than a week there was an honest to God revolution under way, just as Jakes had said. There’s the power of the press for you.