While our apartment is filled with hard drives and servers and cables and all manner of technological accessories, the Russian lover and I own a surprisingly minimal amount of gadgetry.
I managed to not own a digital camera, or a super-cool cell phone with a camera, the same way I managed not to own an ipod. I just failed to care enough to acquire one. The Russian lover shared custody of a digital Nikon with his ex-girlfriend, which was good enough for both of us. We had a camera on standby when we wanted it.
But when the ex-girlfriend had a baby, it was a lot harder to get our hands on the camera. It felt lame to ask to borrow the camera from someone who was recording their child's first smile so that we could take pictures of our cats, or our genitals. And more and more often we found ourselves thinking, wow, too bad we don't have a camera right now to take a picture of the cat falling off the bookshelf, or of me standing there half-dressed against the bookshelf. Or kissing some girl at a party. You know, the precious memories of young single urbanites, the candid moments you want to hang on to forever so that, should I ever be involved in a beauty pageant, there will be sufficient photo documentation to create a salicious scandal.
So we finally got ourselves a camera; the Russian lover decided the Black Friday was a good day to shop for electronics. I decided that it was a good day for him to shop for electronics, and for me to sleep late. He came home with a sleek new camera just as I was getting in the shower, and this is when I realized that there is going to be a novelty phase with the new camera, and this novelty phase will mostly involve a lot of naked pictures of me.
Which, to be fair, I completely expected and totally encouraged. I am a bit of an exhibitionist, after all. And the Russian lover doesn't want to have to pay for porn when he can upload his own, and have it starring a woman he gets to screw later. And I would not mind having evidence of my twenty-something body, so 50 years from now when it is only a memory, and becoming a myth, I can whip out some photos and appreciate the tight-bodied and loose-moraled woman of my youth.