Category — Uncategorized

There is an app called Stillgram that allows you to remove all people from the photo WHILE YOU ARE TAKING THE PICTURE. Did that require all caps? Sort of.

I cannot tell you how many times I’ve patiently waited, annoying my family, for a space to clear before taking a picture so I could have it without people in it. The flower door of the Plantin-Moretus Museum in Antwerp comes to mind. We all aged about 300 years before I could get a moment without a random woman absentmindedly talking to her friend in front of the door. But that is the joy of taking a picture. You wait for the perfect moment and swoop in.

This app allows you to point your phone camera at the Trevi fountain, snap a picture, and have it look like you’re the only human on earth. Oh, and if you want to pay for the premium feature, you can position your loved one in the frame, tap on them, and keep them in the picture, erasing out everyone else. It’s kind of brilliant, but it’s kind of scary. It’s rewriting reality in the moment.

I’m not sure how that is different from coming home and editing everyone out of an image. I know it is possible to do this with software. Or how it is different from any sort of image manipulation, which has been going on long before modern software, such as airbrushing.

I don’t know. I guess because with all the other options, there is an original that reflects what your eye saw in the moment. It can’t capture the mood or the long wait for a plaza to clear. It can’t show all of the angles you didn’t choose or the outtakes. But this app takes us one more step from reality. And I don’t know how I feel about it.

What about you?

The writer Amy Tector asked if people choose a fork or a spoon when it is a meal that could go either way, and while I don’t have strong feelings about utensils, I do always reach for a bowl when a plate could technically do.

We run out of bowls — and we have an extraordinary number of bowls — long before we run out of plates. We run out of bowls before the dishwasher is full, so then I am forced to balance it out with a plate. I will put anything and everything in a bowl. All pasta. All salads. All rice dishes. All usual things that go in bowls, such as soup, cereal, or yogurt. I live a heavily bowl-centered life.

Are you team bowl or plate?

There is a book on my TBR, and while I’m not sure I’ll read it, the concept is interesting: A person buys another person’s whole life. Their home, of course, but also their clothing, their furniture, their car, their belongings, their job, their friends, their family, their cat. All of it.

While parts of it are a tad unrealistic — you cannot control for your job accepting the person or people taking the new person in — the rest of it is entirely possible. The point, of course, is that you would live the other person’s life. Not toss out their stuff, keep the shell, and fill it with what you actually want. You would slip into their life and live it, as if you were them.

It’s something I used to always say to the kids when they were jealous about something. Sure, it would be lovely to have that part of that person’s life, but would you want the rest of it? Would you want their home and their parents and their siblings and their strengths and weaknesses?

I think the answer for most of us would be no. I can’t look at anyone on earth and think, “Yes, I would like to give up everything around me and slip into your life.”

Can you?

The mark of a good purse book is that you can jump in and out of it, a few pages at a time, and you’ve read the book so many times that it doesn’t matter. You can always remember what was happening moments before. It should have characters you like to hang out with or a setting that you like to visit. It should not be too long, and if it is too long, then the publisher should have found a way to make it purse-size.

My purse book during college was really my backpack book: Crime and Punishment. (I know, I was a real hoot.) Other purse books include a now very smushed up copy of Good Omens, and an equally scuffed Dirk Gently.

I finally got a new A4-sized purse. I went with the Tom Bihn Side Hustle, which is the tiniest smidgen larger than a piece of paper.

It has a little book-holding space inside, so I decided to use it for a purse book. But what to get? The natural choice was The Magicians because I sometimes call it my bible. But there are three Magicians books—how could I choose which one? In the end, I went with One Day by David Nicholls. It always makes me happy and sad to read it, and I can jump in and out of it quickly. But mostly, I love Em and Dex so much that I thought it would always fill me with confidence to have a paper version of them with me.

A friend linked to this piece in Sage Journals written by a former BlogHer who has been studying internet interactions for 20ish years. Danah Boyd explains that we called it social media because it was a space for socializing online. But if we’re no longer socializing, is it still social media? Or she proposes that influencers have turned it into parasocial media. You feel like you know the person, but you don’t have a two-way relationship.

She writes,

Users of social media are far more likely to scroll than post – and the content that they consume is often strategically produced and algorithmically curated … We need to stop presuming that these tools are “social media” and begin recognizing that they are now “parasocial media.”

I’ve made plenty of friends through blogging who are true friends. Many have stepped through the screen, and we’ve seen each other offline. Others live too far away, so we talk via Zoom. But, yes, of course I’ve noticed what she describes: “Users are now lucky to see personal content that their friends are posting amid the slick content created by the advertisers and strategic creators who dominate most people’s feeds.”

I know that everyday content and simple musings still exist because most of the people I am connected to online post just that. But a lot of this essay rang true, too. I think a lot about this during this time of year because blogging is what got me through Mother’s Day in the early years. (Apologies for bringing it up here if you weren’t expecting that.)