Hipstamatic your life.

For any vision must mean that something is being omitted.- Howard Moss

A few friends and I were recently discussing technology. This isn’t something we normally do. Really, it was a conversation about love, and we were composing our sonnets to the Hipstamatic app.

I’m not a techie toy person. I take my news on newsprint, with a side of hot coffee. I own a Kindle, and I appreciate it’s efficiency, but ‘efficient’ is never a word I’d prefer to use to describe a book. I’ve described books as friends, companions, loves, and once, I called a book the undeserved death of a tree, but efficient? A reading “device”, for all its functions and buttons, simply doesn’t measure up to holding the weight of the book, the feel and smell of the paper, the soul of the author in my hands as I turn each page. I can’t dogear the Kindle. Technology and I are civil to each other, at best.

But.

The telephone booth I’ve been carrying around for the last five years finally died and left me no choice but to upgrade. I love the iphone S gave me for my birthday. I’ve never felt the thrill of technology before, but the iphone is worth every old fashioned cent (especially since pennies are going the way of the dinosaur and the hand written note). Hipstamatic is the app that takes me to new levels of fascination and adoration. Imagine discovering that the guy you’ve been dating, a kind, intelligent man who makes you laugh regularly and earns a good living, also knows how to fix the air conditioning and bake a perfect panna cotta. Life just improved exponentially.

The app does that. No, not the a.c. or the panna cotta– what it does is improve your life.  Or, at least, it makes your life look a lot hipper and prettier than it is, with it’s gauze, shadows, colors, and borders. At the risk of sounding like a bad infomercial, I promise you that the beauty and interest factor of your life will automatically be raised to the power of 10 when Hipstamatically captured.

See for yourself. (hover over pictures to read caption)

And even my medical waste looks much more interesting than just the bag of trash and necessity that it is:

The irony is that the app takes photos with “the look, feel, unpredictable beauty, and fun of plastic toy cameras from the past”. Ah, nostalgia. Dew-new technology that allows us to make today look like yesterday. When the aluminumed people of the future find our Hipstamatic prints, I bet they’ll feel an electric tweak of envy for how simple and lucid everything looked back then, as in, now. Our wide open skies, our paper books, our bananas.

Oh, and my ringtone? “Retro”.

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For the next time you’re feeling nostalgic:

Nostalgia by Billy Collins

Remember the 1340′s? We were doing a dance called the Catapult.

You always wore brown, the color craze of the decade…

Bed days.

Sharp black shoes that fall on you and kill you.

Yesterday belonged to my bed.

It started badly at 6:20 am when I spilled my daughter’s hot chocolate all over the inside and the outside of the microwave. Simply a minor irritation, but it should have given me some inkling that it’d probably be best to return to bed immediately and let the day pass without me in it.

But no; stubborn to a fault, I kept on, and the day kept on too, telling me in all different sorts of ways I told you so.

As some of you know, the thing I feared most happened. Well, one of the things I fear most. I fear many things, so I should categorize my fears. The fear I fear most related to blogging happened: instead of clicking “save draft”, I clicked “publish”.

Cue wail of horror: NOOOOOOOOOOOOOO.

When there’s something I need to write about but will probably get forgotten or fall into the black hole of my distracted brain, I jot down a few notes so I can return to it later when I’m not cooking dinner, helping the angel with homework, and trying to calm down the neurotic dog whimpering in the corner because a chair tipped over on her when she was trying to get my attention. The lesson, apparently, is that in the age of technology and immediacy, one should not write in chaos, and one should not jot notes for a future post in chaos either; the chaos will become more chaotic.

Subscribers, FB friends, and google readers all got a sneak peek into the strange way I write a post. A found poem, perhaps? Yes, lets call it a found poem.

In the meantime, throughout this day, I had been feeling a heaviness, a rising fullness in my nose, behind my eyes, and in my head. A brewing sinus infection. My body felt it before I could name it. And of course, today I woke up officially sick. Why? Because just a few days ago I had been thinking about how well I had been feeling for a few days in a row. I even wrote about it for a future post. The thing is, when you have CF, rule number one is don’t feel good too loudly.

The other shoe: many of us live waiting for it to fall. It will fall, it will come falling down on your head and land you in the hospital. With a lung infection. Even though you got hit in the head with the falling shoe, it will be something completely unrelated to your head- lungs? sinuses? liver?- that will fail you. That’s the way it works. I’ve seen it happen, and had it happen, countless times. I was gloating about my sinuses on a CF forum (I know, I know, who gloats about their sinuses), and not a week later, the doctor tells me I need sinus surgery. No joke. A guy on a CF forum was in the hospital and posted that he was feeling better and hoping to leave the hospital in a matter of days. Next thing I know, he had taken a bad turn and died. Died. Fucking shoe.

When you have CF and you feel good, it’s a quiet extra bounce in your step, a secret smile on your face, the ability to walk a flight of stairs without getting winded. And even though every ounce inside of you is whooping with joy, you don’t celebrate too loudly. (The Unknown Cystic explores the jinx phenomenon in this post).

I woke up this morning with a full fledged cold. I’m hoping it’s just a thing that doesn’t become a Thing. My ego is still curled up and hiding in humiliation somewhere behind my spleen, and I’m curled up and hiding in my bed with a cup of tea and a sinus headache. None of yesterday’s events qualify as “bad day”- I know bad, really bad, days. I also know that I don’t know the full extent of how bad it can get: it can always get worse. This was simply a bed day. And I should have seen it coming, because just when you feel like you’ve got a pretty good thing going, life shows you just how in control you are. Not. At. All. Please watch for falling shoes.

*Thanks to LBD for providing her sexy foot.

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Today’s Poem: (click on link to read poem in its entirety)

In Praise of My Bed by Meredith Holmes

At last I can be with you!

The grinding hours

since I left your side!…