Artifacts

Sometimes I feel like the inside of my mind must look like the warehouse at the end of Raiders of the Lost Arc, an unending labyrinth of mysteries and treasures that are impossible to inventory. Instead of crates containing magical objects, my head houses memories that are stacked on top of each other, with one occasionally tumbling to the floor and knocking loose an avalanche of recollection.

It's unsettling when something triggers a memory that I've heretofore completely forgotten. It's been hiding there in my subconscious, packed in mental raffia and shelved among all the other memories gathered across my lifetime. A smell or the snippet of a particular song or a glimpse of water sparkling in the sun can trigger instant recall. I'll remember some small event with crystal clarity, though I literally had not thought about it even once since it originally took place.

On occasion, the opposite phenomenon occurs. No matter how hard I try, I cannot remember an important detail or some event in which I'm certain I took part. Perhaps a conversation I know I had, yet cannot remember with whom I was speaking. Or the name of the author who wrote the play I spent a good 3 months out of my life preparing for the stage. Or this picture I found while cleaning up the 26,000 photos that are clogging my computer. I don't recall ever seeing it. Yet it's smack dab in the middle of several that I took of our newborn twin daughters, shortly after we brought them home.

How can I not remember such a precious moment?

Dinner last night: cheeseburgers, corn on the cob

Aaargh and Double Aaargh

Sooooo. Veeeeeeerrrrrrry. SLOOOOOOOOOW.

I'm pretty sure there's an amendment to our Constitution that states something about American citizens possessing the right to quick Internet service. Enough with the health care reform already; how about some relief for those of us who are forced to rely on technology installed sometime during the Medieval era?

I've complained at length about not having any cable TV where we live, and while I really don't care about our inability to watch MTV or ESPN, I do care very much that my computer is moving liking a turtle. I'm about ready to dig into the ground and place cable myself if it'll help me post to Blogger in less than 45 minutes.

Not only is our absence of cable slowing me down, but I believe that our photo storage may be taking up too much space on the hard drive. I use iPhoto, and I've noticed recently that it's holding 26,502 pictures. Is that a lot?

I'm going through our 26,000 pictures, deleting the blurry and transferring those that I don't think I'll need any time soon to CDs. Maybe freeing up a few hundred gigabytes will help speed things up around here. I'm learning quite a bit about my husband in this process of sifting through our massive assortment of pictures. Basically I'm realizing I've married a crackpot.

The guy's got photo collections of the cosmos, which are pretty cool, but the ice sculptures? And all the LOL catz? Okay, those are funny, but we don't need to keep them on our computer when they've got their own website. Hubby's got a folder of pictures of food that he's taken with his cell phone: plates of blueberries, Mexican lunch platters, piles of doughnuts that co-workers have brought to the office, and our dinner from the fancy restaurant we patronized on our anniversary. We've got literally hundreds of pictures of the Orient that his mom has taken on her 3 or 4 trips over to China. Don't ask me why they're on our computer.

I found a bunch of scenic photos labeled "New York in the Fall." Not that we've ever been to New York, in the fall or any other time of year.

I came across a group of wooden boats carved to look like cars. Slug bug.

Speaking of cars, my husband has a fascination with trucks that have fallen through the ice. Up in Fairbanks, there's a lake that people use as a road during the winter, when it's frozen solid and as smooth and wide as the Autobahn. Every year, drivers push their luck by continuing to use the shortcut across the lake after the weather has warmed; one or two end up breaking through.

This is one of many toilet pictures that my perfectly normal spouse has collected. Although the male model in that photo is no relation, he rather resembles my brother-in-law. I showed it to my sister-in-law and casually mentioned that I didn't think it was very classy of Bill to let himself to be photographed like that. She believed me and started to read him the riot act, before our laughter alerted her to the joke. Good times.

Then there are all the photographs of toys that don't sell very well in the U.S.

I am deeply disturbed by the knot pictures. I know they are photoshopped, but still.

While we're on the subject of "deeply disturbed," I absolutely HATE the many, many alien pictures my husband has collected. I particularly loathe the family shots—a loving couple posing for their engagement photo, a mother holding her baby, a family sitting for their portrait—where one of the subjects is an alien, posing just as naturally as can be, like there's nothing strange about it. My husband thinks it's hilarious to slip a few into the screensaver folder that runs our own family pictures across the computer monitor when no one's using it. I'll be walking through the family room and glance over to see something like this:

That alien baby is almost as traumatizing as my slow computer.

Dinner last night: orange chicken, chow mein noodles

My Name is Kim and I'm a . . . Soccer Mom.

Years ago, when I was a DINK, I completed a marketing survey. It asked a few generic questions about my husband's and my ages, genders, professions, and housing situation. After filling in the questions and running it through some kind of software, I sat back skeptically to see what, if anything, this survey could tell me. I was SHOCKED. It correctly stated the type of car I drove, the barbecue grill on my back deck, the brand of vacuum I used, and the clothing stores I frequented. I was not the unique, independent, impossible-to-categorize person I thought I was. Rather, I was totally predictable in my buying habits, by mere virtue of my vital statistics.

Fast forward many years to the moment in time when I first pulled into the parking lot of a soccer field, opened the back of my vehicle, and began pulling out a fold-up chair and my 4-year-old's ball. In a moment of perfect clarity, I realized that I was a bonafide soccer mom. Driving a minivan. With 2 children inside. And a dog at home in the backyard. Marketing executives would drool at the thought of my purchasing power.

My 4-year-old is now eleven, and still playing soccer. In fact, she's a starting defender on a competitive team headed for State. You may have heard horror stories about parents going ballistic at their child's sporting event. I've never witnessed a fist fight, but I have seen and heard my share of dads yelling and moms griping. While I've come to accept, sort of, the label of soccer mom, I chafe at the stereotype and really don't want to be defined by the small but vocal minority of parents who attempt to live out their own failed athletic dreams through their little girls. So, a couple years ago, I picked up my camera.

I may be a soccer mom, but I'd like to think that I'm a creative, generous soccer mom. And good-looking. We musn't forget slender. Where was I? That's right. To resist getting sucked into the negative energy produced by a few loud-mouthed malcontents on the sidelines, I picked up my camera and started snapping action pictures of my daughter. Which led to inadvertently catching some cool shots of her teammates. Which led to publishing a team blog featuring my photography. Which led to creating individual posters for each of the players.

Which led to this long-winded post . . . which is all my way of explaining why I haven't been around lately. I'm busy pretending I'm a sports photographer instead of a soccer mom.

Dinner last night: rice, chili and cheese