Mary Roach - My Planet

I know a lot of other couples have similar bedtime issues, and I hope this column has been helpful. I hope this column has the ability to save the 50 percent of marriages that end in divorce. Or that, at the very least, it helps put one of you to sleep.

I read something scary today.The Hewlett-Packard company is developing a “wearable, always-on” camera. This is a camera, the article said, that promises to “store your life in images.” I don’t need this, because I have Ed. Ed is not wearable—except for rare occasions such as heavy air turbulence, wherein he will fasten himself to your arm like a large, distraught handbag—but he is doing a bang-up job of storing our lives in images. At last count, we have 124 photo albums. “Yup,” he’ll say, “I’m a tourist in my own home.”

Ed takes the pictures, and my job is to put them in albums. This enables me to secretly throw away all unflattering shots of myself, leaving the three or so per year in which my mouth is shut and my eyes are open, a combination that still eludes me after years of practice. So it worked out pretty well. Until last month.

Last month Ed bought a camera that takes photos in various sizes, including panoramic. The word panoramic, as you know, comes from the Latin panor, meaning “impossible to fit into an album.” Ed’s camera has an irritating habit of throwing itself, unbeknownst to us, into panoramic mode, forcing me to scissor each picture down to size.

Consequently, about six months ago, I quit doing my job. Ed hasn’t noticed yet, because Ed—like 99 percent of the population—has never actually opened an album to revisit a set of photos. Our photos function as a sort of archival record, should the authorities one day call into question, say, our presence at the Half Moon Bay pumpkin patch on October 17, 1993. Your Honor, let the record show that at 11:34 a.m., Ed held two pumpkins up to his chest in an amusing, ribald manner.

The photos are piling up rather alarmingly. One day I will be forced to follow the example of the Nepalese postal service, which, I’ve heard, can get so far behind that it simply throws away whole sacks of undelivered mail. One day someone in the Nepalese postal service is going to show up to work with a wearable, always-on camera, and someone else is going to be in big, big trouble.

Imagine if we all had the Hewlett-Packard system. The article says your wearable camera will be able to capture 5 frames per second. That is 300 photos per minute, 18,000 per hour, 27,000 per annual visit to the Half Moon Bay pumpkin patch. Handy for those times when loved ones are involved in a disputed finish at the Preakness, but really, logically speaking, who wants this?

I’ll tell you who. Those people who make you watch slide shows of their vacation trips, trips apparently funded by the U.S. Geological Survey office, in an effort to document every peak, reservoir, and piney ridge in the region. Our friend Larry does this to us, and you just know he’s going to be first in line for the wearable, always-on camera. I’m not having any of it. “Larry,” I’m going to say. “I would love to come over and see your photos, but the Petersons are showing security camera footage of their lobby tonight. Apparently there’s this moment when the doorman adjusts his jacket that is just riveting.”

Not that the “wearable” camera is without merit. It would be mounted on the bridge of your glasses so that it’s shooting whatever you’re looking at. This way, you don’t have to dig it out of your bag and push the proper buttons and compose the shot. Because we all know it takes time to forget to turn on the flash and position your finger just so over the lens. And by then, the moment has passed. Whereas, if you have a constantly snapping digital camera built into your glasses, you will never miss one of life’s special moments, though regrettably, most of those moments will now consist of friends and strangers heartlessly mocking your eyewear.

And, since the system is digital, I won’t have to worry about putting the trillions of snapshots in albums. I can upload them to “data centers,” where they will accumulate to the point that they crash the Internet and world chaos—Finally! Something worth documenting!—ensues.

There’s a TV ad where Celine Dion is driving all nightacross some desolate portion of what looks to be the American Southwest. She’s singing “I drove all ni-i-i-iight” and she’s not singing it quietly. The lyrics suggest she’s driving all night because she can’t wait to see some guy, presumably that guy with the neatly trimmed white beard who’s her husband. Also, the ad implies, she’s got a cool car she loves to drive. I’m not buying it. A woman wouldn’t drive all night. She’d book a flight so she can arrive on her beloved’s doorstep looking washed and cheerful, as opposed to showing up with no sleep and no shower and that sour mouth taste caused by gas-station coffee and worn-out spearmint gum. No woman enjoys driving that much. This is the man’s deal: to shift gears while driving too fast on an open road. They live for this.

Alas, they are living a fantasy, for there is no more open road. The open road is a myth perpetrated by the car industry, which routinely goes around closing off highways and city streets in order to shoot ads featuring vast stretches of open road. These days, only people who drive in the wee hours of the morning, such as bread delivery van drivers and Celine Dion, can make use of five-speed overdrive and rack-and-pinion steering.

Reality does not deter the male driver. The male driver will pretend he is on the Bonneville Salt Flats or the northern reaches of the Kancamagus Highway when in fact he’s on the I-80 on-ramp.

My husband, Ed, routinely makes plans to drive to L.A. from San Francisco, simply because he loves to drive. In his mind, he’s the man in the Saab turbo ad. He pictures himself flying down the Coastal Highway with the top down and the music up, wearing those funny leather gloves with the holes cut out of the back. Somewhere around Milpitas, it dawns on him that a) taking the coast route will add four hours to his drive, b) we don’t own a convertible, and c) people are laughing at the gloves.

Now although the male professes to love driving—to the point where he will waste six hours on a drive that can be flown in one—he must always seek and pursue the shortest possible route to an across-town destination. I give you an actual, unretouched in-car exchange between Ed and our friend Dan:

“You know if you take Clipper Street,” Dan is saying, “you can shave six minutes off the drive.” These minutes go into a special account, where they can be redeemed for chest hair, leather gloves with holes cut out of the back, and other bonus masculinity awards.

“Not this time of day. That preschool lets out, and the whole right lane’s blocked.” Ed is making this up. A man will say anything to avoid being exposed as The Guy Who Doesn’t Know the Fastest Route. This is right up there, humiliation-wise, with being exposed as The Guy Who Asks for Directions. The deepest shame that can befall an American male is for a stranger in a gas station to find out that— Oh my God —you don’t know your way around a neighborhood you’ve never been to.

Meanwhile, Dan’s wife, Wendy, and I are across town in her car, trying to find our way back from a matinee. Viewed from above, our route resembles the adorable and random wanderings of a toddler’s Etch A Sketch drawings. It is not the most direct route to her house or my house or anything at all—save the mental breaking point of our husbands. But we’re fine with it. To a group of women, sitting in a car is little different from sitting in someone’s home, only with wheels and not enough closet space. We get caught up in the conversation and forget about the petty details of navigation, such as west vs. east and the like. Wendy crests a hill. “Is that the ocean? How’d we get here?”