As you may know, I like to view my very-nearly-fifty-year-old self as all hip and early adopterish. I have an unnatural dread of youngsters snickering as I hold up my new-fangled thingamabobber and look at it over the rims of my glasses, saying something like “tell me again, what button I push to see the grandkids in their space pod?” So when I started reading about Pinterest, I begged an invitation and checked it out.
As it turns out, Pinterest can be a useful tool or a waste of time and energy, or both. I am finding it tremendously useful, but it took some time and tinkering to sift out what I really wanted to see and “pin” to my virtual pin boards. At first, I saw no point in looking through hundreds and thousands of pictures and picking those that struck my fancy. A lot of what I saw seemed like nothing more than an extension of the bumper sticker or the Facebook profile - one more way to show off a little and tell the world that one had read (and liked) “Bleak House,” or spent time in Uruguay. There were also hundreds of cute animal pictures, cute kid pictures, and inspirational sayings of various kinds, things that might be diverting for two seconds but I am unlikely to “pin” and revisit anything along the lines of LOLCats.
The beauty of a good “pin,” though, is that there is a narrative portion that can tell you whether a picture is just “for pretty,” or whether one can click through to a recipe for that cupcake, or directions for making wall sconces from Dollar Store funnels. For me, the recipes and how-tos have been amazingly useful. I admit that I “collect” pretty pictures of things that I like, moons, owls, birds, flowers, and Paris street scenes…images that make me smile when I am stuck someplace for fifteen minutes and want a reminder of the beauty in the world. That’s good, but that’s the fluff.
My husband’s last name is Einbinder. We’ve always assumed the German translation (one binder) meant that it was the moniker for the trade of bookbinding. It’s a rare name. In fact the only other person we’ve ever met with any connection to that name is the movie director Mike Binder. One day, years ago, at the Pumpkin Patch in our neighborhood, we struck up a conversation with him. Blank Man, a movie he directed, was absolutely the funniest movie that year. It still holds up. David Allen Grier kills in it. Of course, he always kills. It turned out that Mike’s last name was shortened from Einbinder. Since then, when we see him places, we exchange that twinkle of recognition of our ‘kinship’. 
When was it ok to just blithely accept that products are now
engineered for obsolescence? Case in point: our stinkin’ Panasonic
cordless phones!!!
If you haven’t heard of Ooma, you will soon. I discovered it because I
was sick and tired of paying ATT&T for a landline we rarely ever
used that cost us over $40 a month with no extras. We
didn’t even have call waiting, which was nice for us, but the busy
signal always freaked our friends out. At least they knew we were home
even if they couldn’t reach us.
I’m obsessed. I want to know everything. I’ve hunted for her favorite recipe for Moose stew. I spend hours on my computer searching for footage. I want transcripts. YouTube moments. Because I couldn’t write the stuff that comes out of her mouth. And I write dialogue for a living.