It occurred to me that a broken heart never really heals.  You learn to cope, you learn to move on, you learn to love again, but you never fully get over the loss.  I realized this yesterday when a song came on the radio that made me think of the first girlfriend I ever had, 23 years ago.  It’s pretty silly when I think about how long ago that was and how much has happened to me since then.  I was lying in bed, next to my wonderful wife, the love of my life, with our beautiful daughter just waking in the next room and Up Where We Belong by Joe Cocker and Jennifer Warnes came on the radio and I was a twelve year old boy all over again, dancing in the dark, holding her for the last time.

My sisters, Kathy and Brenda, were always active in sports and both played on the high school softball team.  Kerri was the team’s bat girl and her mother was a coach.  I think I had only seen Kerri once over the summer before the school year started and I moved from elementary school to junior high.  She was in my health class and we clicked on the first day of class.  I had never had a girlfriend much less ever asked a girl out so I wasn’t sure what to do or if she even liked me.  Two days later, we had health class again and it became clearer she was interested in me.  When I got home from school and told my sisters, they encouraged me to call her and ask her out.  That evening, I looked up her number in the phone book and called her.  I don’t remember what I said and I’m sure it wasn’t very smooth, but she said said “yes” anyway and we were officially “going out.” Three days into seventh grade and I had a girlfriend.

Kerri had grown up on the other side of town from me and I knew little outside of my neighborhood.  She had gone to a different elementary school, hung out at different places, and had a whole group of friends I had never met before.  I latched onto her and her friends and her world became my world.  Her friends Aaron and Brian became my new best friends and since they each dated two of Kerri’s friends, the six of us hung out nearly every day; we were inseperable.  We went to the Museum of Science together and hung out at Aaron’s house and the library nearby.  They also introduced me to the monthly dances at the Congregational church where we went on the first Friday of every month and slow danced in the dark.  It was there that I remember dancing with Kerri and listening to Up Where We Belong.

We dated for most of the school year but after about five months, things started to go off course.  Aaron had broken up with Karen, Brian had broken up with Linda, and then things started going sour with Kerri and me.  We stayed together for a little while, through the arguments and the make-ups.  I remember toward the end being moved by and asking her to listen to Think of Laura by Christopher Cross, a particularly melancholy song popularized at the time by Luke and Laura on General Hospital but actually written about a friend of Cross’ girlfriend who was also named Laura.  I tried to patch things up with Kerri and held out hope that we’d make it work.  But then, at the next dance, I saw her dancing with another boy.  I was crushed.  The dances were our place and I felt violated.  In retaliation, I asked another girl to dance and Kerri confronted us in the middle of the dance floor.  We yelled at each as the other kids watched and then it was over.

I stopped hanging out with Aaron and Brian and eventually lost touch with them altogether as they moved away or went to different schools.  I made new friends and made new girlfriends.  I even continued to go to the dances after Kerri had stopped going.  I would still see Kerri around school, but we never spoke again.  During our senior year of high school, she dated a boy who had grown up across the street from me and was in my homeroom, and I remember even then, five years later, feeling a little bitter about that as if it had anything to do with me whatsoever.  Coincidentally, a couple years ago before my wife left the hospital where she used to work, she ended up training Karen for a similar position - small world.  I think Maggie and Karen may still email each other from time to time, but neither she nor the rest of the gang from that year have attended any of the class reuinions, so I haven’t seen Karen, or Kerri for that matter, since high school.

I haven’t thought much of Kerri in the years that have passed and have had many girlfriends and several loves since then, including those on a more intimate, mature level.  But, every once in a while, when I pass some place that we shared, or hear a song like I did yesterday, I might think about her and that time of my life.  It’s not that I wish I could do it over or I wish that things had turned out differently, because I don’t.  It’s just that sometimes that old wound opens up for a little bit and I’m twelve years old all over again.

"To look backward for a while is to refresh the eye, to restore it, and to render it the more fit for its prime function of looking forward.”
Margaret Fairless Barber

No, this isn’t a hostile missive against our friends across the Atlantic.  I’m talking about slaughtering the English language, or at least the constant attempts to do so through poor practice.  For years, I’ve argued that one of the great things about the Internet is that it has people reading and writing again.  Ever since the introduction of the telephone and television into our homes, society as a whole had been eschewing the written word for the spoken word.  The art of letter writing had been replaced by answering machine messages.  Books had been replaced by sitcoms, and the newspaper had been replaced by tabloid talk shows.  Where once we pored over the written word and studied not only content but context, we had become a people who needed information now, damnit.

In some ways, the internet has reversed the course; in others it has worsened the situation.  The speed of internet transmissions has only hastened the desire for speedy information asap and spawned its own monsters: the acronym and l33t speak.  Acronyms are sets of words of phrases from with the first letter is taken for abbreviation or emphasis, e.g. lol, wtf, brb, btw, faq, etc.  L33t-speak is the act of replacing the letters in words with other letters, numbers, or characters for purposes of style, e.g. pwned, sux0r, h4x0r, w00t, and d00dz.  Fortunately, there are many online dictionaries for both.

FYI, l33t speak has a much longer tradition than most people are aware.  It dates back to pirate bulletin board systems from the mid- to late-80s.  The term “elite” (from which “leet” and “l33t” is derived) indicated that a pirate bulletin board system featured the latest pirated software, typically 0-2 days from the date it was cracked.  When a pirate group stripped the copy protection from a title, it would add a splash screen announcing their accomplishment, their list of friends and associates, and the date on which it was released to the world.  Since few systems operated above 1200 bps, it could take hours to transfer a single title from one person to another person, thus SYSOPs that had received a title within the first 48 hrs. of its release had to be “in the know” as they would have been among the first to whom the software was sent.  These SYSOPs and their BBS’s were deemed elite.  The signature mark of these elite BBS’s were their use of abbreviations, the letter “z” in place of “s” and other character substitutions.  Software titles were referred to as “warez”, “][” was used in place of the roman numeral II, and many pirate groups wrote their typically three-initialed group names with substitute character like “]\[” in place of “N” and “]3” in place of “B.”

However, lest I come off as an ‘net basher, I should also point out that abbreviations, acronyms, and character substitutions didn’t begin with telecommunications - the advertising community has to take its fair share of the blame.  Signs have long dotted our roadways advertising “BBQ”, “Late Nite”, “Drive Thru,” “24/7,” “Stop ‘N Go,” and “4 Sale.” Many companies use misspelled words in their own company names to stand out from the crowd.  We see words like “Quik,” “Foto,” and “Snak” so often that they don’t usually register with us as misspellings when seen in 3ft tall letters.  Some, like Toys R Us, combine a misspelling with a reversed letter.  Worse than the destruction of the English language in road side signs and business names, is the often unintelligible use of abbreviations and acronyms used in classified advertising.  Each type of classified has its own set of abbreviations.  A typical real estate classified may look like “lg slr 4br 2ba fpl lr w/wtw hw dr w/d & eik fsbo.” Personal ads may be an equally cryptic jumble of letters like “dwf iso ns sbm 4 ltr & tlc.” Other advertising acronyms include “cod,” “bro,” and “sase”.  While we’re on the topic of newspaper advertisements, I should also share an interesting story on the history of “ok.” Apparently it began as a fad in newspaper offices in Boston in 1838.  At that time, newsrooms began using abbreviations for many common phrases, often using purposeful misspellings of the original words.  Most of the abbreviations lost popularity, but “ok” caught on with the l33t members of the public.  It was after the Van Buren campaign of 1840, that the abbreviation for “oll korrect” (all correct) became widespread.

Surely worse than these examples of willful obliteration are the frequent unintentional errors that pervade the written and spoken word.  One of my personal pet peeves is the recent phenomenon toward removing the objective case from the language altogether and simply replacing it with the subjective case.  It used to be that the most common mistake with the subjective case was in using the word “who” instead of the word “whom.” “Who” is used when it is the subject of the phrase such as “who threw the ball?” “Whom” is used when it is the object of the phrase as in “you threw the ball to whom.” You don’t often hear people use whom.  However, I’ve recently become cognizant of this same trend with the words “I” and “me.” Like who and whom, I is used as the subject of the phrase and me is used as the object.  I find that seemingly intelligent people are now using I in place of me.  IMHO, I feel this trend is because they think that me is an ignorant word whereas I denotes class - something along the lines of “me and Billy Bob are gonna get us some beer,” but “the sommelier presented the Millesimes cognac to Winford and I.” They’re both wrong.  As disturbing as this misuse of such a common word as I is the recent anomaly that I refer to as the “Reality TV subjective case,” named so after the alarming number of times the mistake is heard on reality television programs, I believe due to the misguided attempt to sound smart in front of hundreds of thousands of viewers.  With the “Reality TV subjective case” the speaker avoids the debate over I and me entirely and replaces both with the word “myself.” “I didn’t want to get voted out, so Richard, Sharon, and myself formed an alliance.  Little did I know, but Rob overhead Sharon telling Richard and myself that he wanted to vote out Rob.” Ugh!  A really tough drinking game would be to watch an episode of Big Brother and drink every time someone says “myself” or “strategical.”

Another common mistake is the frequent misuse of the apostrophe.  Apparently I’m not the only one to notice it as there are numerous sites dedicated to the often maligned punctuation mark.  The funny thing about the apostrophe is that it’s almost never omitted when it should have been used; quite the opposite, it’s usually inserted where it doesn’t belong.  “Oil change’s,” “Joe’s Antique’s,” and “The Jones’s” are three examples of apostrophe mistakes on signs in the neighborhood near my work.  As demonstrated by all the sites dedicated to these slipups, apostrophe errors abound.

As if the previously mentioned examples of carnage in dialogue, advertising, and reality television weren’t enough, some sites have dedicated themselves to exposing poor English in areas where one might have expected a little more diligence.  Killian Advertising features a section on their web site titled, “Cover Letters from Hell.” In it, the advertising agency provides examples of poorly written pitches for employment.  The examples range from the strange (one is written in the form of “‘Twas the Night Before Christmas") to the openly hostile (a wannabe web site designer insults their existing site layout).  The site is at times both funny and troubling.

It makes me wonder if Edward George Bulwer Lytton would still think that “the pen is mightier than the sword.” Somehow, I’d have to think that he’d be rofl at all of this.

"That is not good language which all understand not.”
George Herbert

P.S. If you were paying attention, you will notice that I interspersed each one of these grammatical issues throughout this blog entry.

I’ve always loved photography, not just the act of capturing a subject on film, but viewing photographs themselves.  It doesn’t matter if I know who the people are, or where the scene takes place, or anything about the photo at all.  I especially love to look at old photographs even though often times they make me a little melancholy.  There’s something powerfully immortal about seeing a photographic image, sometimes decades after the original photograph was taken.

There’s one old picture of my mother that I love in particular.  She must be about five years old, seated on the front stairs of her parents’ home, smiling broadly.  My grandparents passed away over ten years ago and then the house was sold and converted into apartments, looking a little like it did then, but still very different.  Even my mother has since passed.  However, when I look at this photo, it’s like she’s still alive.  There she is: smiling, happy; her life is full of hope and promise.  It’s hard to imagine from looking at this little girl that she’s ever had a sad or difficult day, although I know she did, even at this tender age.  It also makes me wonder at what she would have been thinking, how she imagined her future, and if she would have approved of how her life turned out.  It’s not that I think my mother died with lots of regrets, although I’d have to think she must have had a few, perishing at a relatively young age from a painful cancer, but I wonder what she would have thought then, at the moment this photo was taken.

Of course, my melancholy at this particular photograph could rationally be explained as simply the result of feelings dredged up about my mother’s death, the loss of her from my life.  I couldn’t find fault with that analysis.  However, the explanation doesn’t fit when I see other photos of people who are still alive, or people who are complete strangers, or even photos that contain no discernible people at all.  Some of the same feelings are evoked when I look at these photos.  I am sometimes overwhelmed by the emotion of looking at an exact sliver of time in life, a sliver that has no end and no beginning but is full of promise or joy or even captures sadness itself.

I’ve heard it said that some jungle tribes in less industrialized countries once feared photography, believing that a camera could capture a person’s soul.  I don’t know if there’s any truth to these rumors or not, or if they’re simply a product of the imaginations of overworked writers tasked with dreaming up new plots for Tarzan or similar black-and-white movies, but regardless of where it started, there might actually be something to this superstition.  However, instead of extracting and locking the soul inside the camera or photograph, maybe a photo can provide us with a glimpse of the soul.  Through the photograph, a part of the soul can live for as long as the photo survives and as long as people continue to look at it.  I hope that’s true.

"Develop interest in life as you see it; in people, things, literature, music - the world is so rich, simply throbbing with rich treasures, beautiful souls and interesting people. Forget yourself.”
Henry Miller