On Saturday, we went to Baltimore to take pictures for Craig’s photography class. But…we didn’t have any film. It is not an easy thing to find black & white film without prior planning, but through various phone calls home where my brother is online 24/7, and we were directed to an area where we might find film.

Sunday was also devoted to image collecting, in Tenleytown…where Craig wanted to take some photos of the radio towers there. Then we went to Krupin’s Deli for lunch, which is, to my knowledge, the only Jewish deli in DC and if it’s not the only one, I’m sure it’s the best one.

At the table next to us, there was a mixed table of about 4 adults and 4 or 5 kids. The kids’ conversation was like listening to an Edward Albee play.
“Cool, he sacked the quarterback!”
“M is for Matthew”
“What’s that mean?”
“Who ordered coke?”
“Is it diet?”
“no”
“S is for Saving Money”
“Is it diet?”
“Did you put your mouth on this?”
“ew”
“they tackled the quarterback”
“Joe! look at Joe’s face. Look at Joe’s face. He’s making a funny face. Look at Joe.”
“Is it contaminated?”
“You don’t even know what contaminated means”
“Yes, I do. It means someone put their hands on it.”

And with that one of the moms there paid attention and said immediately:
“That’s not what contaminated means. It means…”
and she gave a very technical description, like what you’d find in the dictionary.

I have a habit of often responding to someone’s paraphrasing with “No, that’s not it. ” And then I’ll go on to describe exactly what the person said, in a slightly different way. It just wasn’t exact enough.

And I thought, if that mom had said instead, “wow, I’ve never thought of it that way before. It can also mean this…” …the tone of that entire exchange would have been different. But it’s hard, when you’ve spent your entire life working on getting at the exact meaning, to appreciate the subleties of meaning that other people have to offer.

Haven’t had any time to read anything fun & theoretical. My life is Spanish & ASP & PHP and all day long it means I’m having communication issues with either a person or a computer. I do not feel that there is a tacit understanding between me and my computer and in fact it is a sort of failed communicative enterprise. The computer cannot understand my way of expressing what I want it to do. Damn you computer!!!!