Our microwave died this weekend. And in the few days since its demise, I've already reached for it multiple times, only to realize—with a bit of frustration—that I must instead use the stove to reheat a bowl of soup or a plate of spaghetti. How truly inconvenient. And, as if the loss of the microwave weren't traumatic enough, last night's windstorm knocked out our power for almost an hour. Really now. What's a twenty-first century housewife to do? First leftovers on the stove and then dishes by candlelight? How positively medieval.

Actually, the medieval experience was kind of fun—in a historical theme-park sort of way. Candles and flashlights are exciting precisely because they are out of the ordinary. But every theme park vacation must come to an end, and I, for one, prefer having light and heat instantly available at the press of a button.  So I've been shopping around, hoping to find a reasonable price on an appliance that will adequately meet our microwave needs. Yes, our microwave needs.

Somehow, every convenient new gadget or service that begins as a luxury ends up, in a few short years, as a need.

I distinctly remember the day that my parents bought their first microwave. We were living in a rental house on Monroe St. in Spokane, Washington, when we welcomed into our home the boxy appliance that would take over our counter space and light up the kitchen at night with its glowing-blue digital clock. It had an attractive wood grain pattern printed on its sides. And it changed our lives. It changed American life.

With the advent of the microwave came a whole new array of convenience foods: bags of pre-buttered popcorn, single servings of soup and oatmeal, and complete four-course meals, to name a few. The microwave turned leftovers into a time-saving, eat-at-your desk lunch option. And what the microwave did for college cuisine is probably incalculable. There are apartment-dwelling undergrads who manage to complete a four-year degree without ever turning on a stove. True story. Why spend valuable hours slicing and dicing and boiling and sautéeing, when you can heat and ingest a tray of Lean Cuisine in less time than it takes to preheat an oven? And, as an added bonus, there are no dishes to contend with when you're done. It's truly a triumph of American efficiency. But it can, unfortunately, also be triumph of American insipidity and impatience.

The microwave seems to me to be the perfect metaphor for this American life: easy, high-tech instant gratification. We live in a microwave culture. Let's face it: deep down, every American is pro-nuke. We like everything to be cheap, simple, and immediate; we want everything to be microwavable: work, education, religion, politics, health care, entertainment, sex, and, of course, food. So naturally, when my microwave breaks, I'm off in search of a new one before the old one has cooled.

I guess I could be making an argument right now for how much richer life would be if I just went back to the days before microwaves entered my life. I could eschew the nuke-it culture by kissing my microwave goodbye for good, and I might even find my argument convincing. After all, I'm fully in favor of putting the brakes on in lots of areas of life. I don't expect a newly elected politician to press a button and eliminate all the nation's problems the day after he takes office. I don't want my kids to learn piano "in 5 easy lessons." I would rather not get a master's degree with a few clicks of the mouse. I believe that most of what's valuable comes through hard work, patience, and sacrifice, and that includes food.

I like to cook. Honestly, I do. And gardening is another wonderful way to learn delayed gratification when it comes to bringing dinner to the table. I'm a huge fan of homegrown tomatoes. I like a slow-roasted brisket as much as anyone. But at the same time, I miss my microwave. There does seem to be a legitimate place for time-saving devices, and reheating the leftovers, to my mind, is one of them. With a microwave, I've lost nothing but extra dishes to clean, and I've gained precious minutes at the table with my family. Sometimes, instant gratification is, well, gratifying. And, and as fun as cooking by candlelight can be, when it comes to yesterday's chicken soup, I still believe that the best option is to just "nuke" it.

Here was a rare moment of quiet calm and perfect lighting. Soft sunlight from a grey, February sky shone through the window onto my youngest son's face as he drove Matchbox cars across the hardwood, making spluttery motoring sounds with his wet lips. Absorbed in his own imagination, he did not seem to notice that I was watching him. How could a mom with a camera resist the urge to freeze time? I couldn't. Pressing the shutter, I thought to myself, "Years from now we'll ooh and ahh over these sweet photographs of childhood, these preserved glimpses of real life."

Real life. Yes, sir. Later, as I reviewed those charming photos on my computer, real life showed itself, glowing in all its full-color ridiculousness, on my screen. There, smeared across my toddler's cherubic face, was a crusty streak of snot. And this snot created a sort of ethical dilemma.

I admit that I am rarely bothered by the work of digitally improving upon reality. Having spent the last 13 years using Photoshop to remove everything from horse manure and acne to birthday cake and entire backgrounds, I knew that a little smear of shiny mucus could be removed in a few quick clicks of the mouse. That would be the easy part. The hard part was deciding if I really ought to take that bit of "reality" out of the picture. This photo was supposed to preserve a true-to-life image of my son's childhood. He had looked so sweet at the time. Or so I thought. How could I have failed to notice the boogers smeared across his otherwise flawless skin? But there they were, blown up to more than full size on my computer monitor, reminding me once again that this is, indeed, a fallen world.

So what to do now? It struck me that I had to decide what story I was trying to tell here, and whether the story was true. I could make his skin look perfectly clean, but my child, had not, in fact, looked like this. Was I willing to make people believe that he had? When "reality" is the very thing I was trying to capture, then shouldn't I leave "reality" alone? Doesn't the booger on the baby represent the truth of the matter? Isn't cloning it out—or whitening teeth or replacing the ugly family photo background with a snowy wonderland—a kind of lie? And isn't lying, under normal circumstances, a sin? I frequently tell my children that it is.

Oh, the hypocrisy! Oh, the deception! Maybe photo editing should keep more people awake at night.

Yes, it's a fallen world all right. Even the everyday realities of head colds and dirty laundry can serve as small reminders of this sad truth. Ugliness and suffering truly do exist. That's the reality. And if you want to win a Pulitzer, that's the reality you've got to depict before the public. We've got to keep our feet on the rocky ground, right? Don't try to hide all the foulness, the cruelty, the sickness, the death; let's keep it real. Stock up on black eyeliner and come to grips with the truth: life is pain. Leave the snot on the baby. The snot is real.

Sure. These sophisticated cynics do have a point: Snot is real. Unfortunately for them, the snot is apparently more real than the baby. But here's the thing: the baby was there before the booger. The beauty was there before ugliness marred it. And the beauty will remain when the ugliness has been wiped away, which seems to say that the beauty is the more enduring reality—the more real reality.

I recently watched a short video that's been floating around the internet—one that shows how an average-looking woman is transformed by an army of stylists and at least one digital wizard into an idealized image of marketable beauty. "See?" the ad implies, "Beautiful women are fake. Cover girls don't really exist." That's probably true to some degree. Perhaps we're right to think that these fashionistas have gone too far in their pursuit of beauty at the expense of truth. And, I suppose, for all of us average-looking women, there's comfort in the thought that at least we're not fake.

But the truth is, whether or not we have personal stylists and professional photo manipulators at our disposal, most of us do what we can to hide our imperfections and draw attention to our strengths. Girls with nice legs and bad teeth will swing their hips in skinny jeans but smile with their lips closed. We prefer not to have our ugly side put on display. We would rather not have our errors and sins repeated by the people we've wronged. None of us wants to be the one stuffing a fork full of mashed potatoes into her mouth when the family photographer captures the moment at Thanksgiving Dinner.

It may be true that we wake up with bed head, that we get the flu, that we sometimes yell at our kids. But that doesn't mean we should want posterity to forever remember us that way.  Of course there's a kind of selfish pride that cannot admit to any faults, but that's not what I'm talking about. We—all of us—want to be shown to advantage. And it's not necessarily because we want the world to believe a lie. Often it's because we want the world to see the more attractive side of the truth. It's because we love ourselves. I know I do.

In fact, we love ourselves so much, that the golden rule is built upon that basic assumption: You know how much you love yourself? Well, that's how much you ought to love your neighbor. Whoa. That's not easy. But I think we must conclude that the stories we tell about our neighbors—including our littlest neighbors—should be the kind of stories we would want told about us.

I'm no sentimentalist. Dark moments are found in everyone's story—in the world's story. Earthquakes, ear infections, cancer, crucifixion, snot—they're all real. I don't deny it. But does that mean the essence of the story is ugliness and evil? Is Sleeping Beauty a tale of darkness and despair because it involves the witch and the thorns and a battle to the death?  If the essence of life is pain, then (in all seriousness) how do we explain chocolate? How do we account for orange blossoms and the Caribbean Sea and goose down and Tetris and Easter? How do we make sense of the sweet baby-the one who also happens to have snot on his face? What about that reality? To say that life is pain is to ignore the coexistent—and the far more persistent—realities of beauty and love and forgiveness and joy.

Yes, the history of the world is a story with some truly gut-wrenching scenes. But I've read the spoilers, and I know the ending. This story ends with a wedding. The knight in shining armor slays the dragon, claims his bride‚ declaring her flawless (yes, flawless). The wedding feast  is incomparably glorious, and every sorrow, every tear—and every runny nose—is wiped away. Heaven is brought to earth, and Love, in perfect fairy tale fashion, conquers all. That's the end. Roll the credit.

So what does that have to do with Photoshopping the snot off the toddler?

Only this: that the child is a more important—a more real—part of this story than the bit of ugliness marring his face. Sure, I want to remember reality. But I also want to remember the beauty that underlies reality. I don't want to forget that sin exists. But I also do not want to forget that love covers a multitude of sins. Sometimes, of course, the dirt and the messes and the runny noses will be part of the fun of remembering. And even the most painful challenges, when they have been overcome, can become the stories we like best to tell. But at the same time, when I do tell stories about (or take pictures of) my children, I hope I will edit out the flaws and remember them in the best possible light. Not because I am lying about them, and not because they are perfect, but because I love them. I would want them to do the same for me. And in this case, I've decided that if love can cover sin, it can surely cover snot. In some small way, Photoshop looks a lot like forgiveness.

While we're on the subject... As I was writing the last post about digital communication it crossed my mind that the great stories of history and literature—and of our own lives—might have been drastically altered by 21st century communications technology. For example:

Remember that fateful letter from Friar Lawrence to Romeo, telling him that Juliet was only mostly dead? The one that arrived too late? If Shakespeare had instead given each of those two men a Motorola Razr, timely communication would have been established and tragedy turned into comedy. ...Except that the Capulets and Montagues would have continued biting their thumbs at one another until the world's end.

Or how about Robinson Crusoe? If he'd made a satellite phone call from the sinking ship, he might have been rescued about 28 years sooner. And nobody would ever have cared much about his survival story. Oh, and Friday would never have been rescued from murderous cannibals.

Then there's the whole Midnight-Ride-of-Paul-Revere thing. One if by land, two if by sea? Totally unnecessary. "Through the night went his cry of alarm, to every Middlesex village and farm"? A waste of breath. Just text it, Paul, and all those colonial farmers will be ready with their muskets and their night-vision goggles.

And if Odysseus had bought matching iPhones for Penelope and himself before heading off to battle the Trojans, the trip home would have taken on an entirely different tone:
P: Honey, where are you? I left you like ten voice mails yesterday. 
O: Long story, Penny. After a rough day on the wine-dark sea, we took a pit stop on some island. I had already checked Google Maps, and I told the guys that there was a nice, authentic Greek gyro joint on the next island, but did they listen? They were so hungry for a steak, they just couldn't wait. They came across this herd of grass-fed, free-range cattle and just went nuts with their battle axes—had a big ol' Texas barbecue.
P: Typical men.
O: Yeah, well, it gets worse. It turned out that those cows belonged to Helios the Sun god. Seriously bad news. Let's just say I'll be home a bit later than we'd planned. I'll tell you all about it in dactylic hexameter when I get there.

Poetic, no?

It seems pretty clear to me that our modern hyper-connectedness would have drained a lot of the color from many of history's best stories. And even from my own life's stories.

When I was 13, my family lived in Kenya for 6 months. Without a cell phone. Or a home phone connection, for that matter. My dad did have a phone at his office, but the line would mysteriously go dead whenever he mentioned anything negative about events taking place in the country at the time. E-mail was in its infancy, and few people ever thought of communicating via computer. (This is making me feel old.) Our contact with home was minimal and normally involved letters that might take weeks to arrive.

While we lived there, a day came when my brother and I could not get home from school because of a riot taking place in the city through which we needed to travel. Cars and trucks—so loaded with people that the bumpers nearly touched the road—were streaming out of the town, and ours was the only car going toward it. Our driver stopped to ask what was happening, but we could only get hints and rumors. A few people said that they had fled because everybody else was doing it. So we waited. Meanwhile, news of tear gas and gunshots spread through the surrounding area, and my parents had no way of finding out where we were—or whether we were alive. For a few nervous hours they felt the way that many Haitian parents must be feeling now: fearful and wondering where their children might be. With today's technology, a quick text message could have told my parents that we were safe, and spared them those hours of distress. But then we wouldn't have had much of a story to tell afterward. Every good story involves some kind of conflict or tension waiting to be resolved. Who wants to hear about the day that started happy, went along happily, and ended with smiles all around? I want to live that day. But I don't want to hear about it. Without those hours spent in fear, this story wouldn't be worth telling. And a cell phone, I'm quite sure, would have removed the uncertainty that made the afternoon memorable.

Another event that my sons love for me to recount is the day in 1998 when I was driving alone through the barren wasteland of Central Washington and slid off the highway into a field. My car came to a stop directly on top of an ancient, rusty plough that was half-buried in the dirt. After trying everything I could to free myself from the grip of that antique piece of machinery (4-wheel-drive, reverse, digging, pushing), I only managed to spin my tires deeper into the dust. I was stranded and clearly needed help. With a cell phone, I would have let my fingers do the walking. Without one, my feet had to do it.

The nearest sign of civilization was a dilapidated farm house about 40 yards away. I waded shakily through the dry grass, climbed up the steps onto the collapsing porch and knocked insistently on the ripped screen door. A couple of hung-over teenage boys dragged themselves off of their bare living room mattresses to answer my persistent pounding. "The party ended like three hours ago," they informed me. When I explained my situation  and asked for a phone, they said that theirs had been disconnected for months. In an act of selfless heroism, they pulled on some shoes and walked back with me to my car. After helping me try unsuccessfully to push it off the plough, they shrugged and walked back to the house to sleep off the last night's beer binge. But before they did, they sent me to search for a man who was wandering the property seeking antique farm machinery to weld into fences. I found him behind an old silo. He turned out to be a fifty-year-old, three-hundred-pound Mexican immigrant with a great dane. And red pickup. After laughing a bit at my predicament, he drove his truck to the scene of the accident and used it to push my car free of the plough.

Unfortunately, once he did, the radiator began to empty its green contents into the dirt. He raised his eyebrows and whistled through his teeth. "There's no way you're gonna make it to town like that," he told me. We climbed into the cab of his pickup, and he drove me to the next farm with a phone, called a tow truck for me, and drove back to my car to wait with me. For the next hour, we sat  on his tail gate and learned each other's names. I told him I was an art student. He told me he'd sent his daughter to the Art Institute of Seattle with money he'd made from welding fences out of farm junk—the kind of farm junk my car was stuck on. He offered me a cold Pepsi. I showed him the design projects I had in my car.

Thanks to my lack of a cell phone, I ended up spending a ridiculous and fascinating hour on the back of this man's pickup, exchanging stories and sharing soda under the baking sun, next to a dog the size of a pony.

It's true that the story could have turned out differently—so differently that I'd never want to repeat it. A cell phone offers a sense of safety, and I wouldn't want to find myself in a similar situation again without one. But it's also true that if I'd had my little flip phone at my disposal, I would never have made human contact with the people at that farmhouse, and I would have one less memory to laugh about with my kids. In retrospect, I'm thankful that I (and Romeo and Crusoe and Paul Revere and Odysseus) didn't have a phone that day. But I think I prefer the way things are now. Mostly.

She doesn't own a cell phone. She has no e-mail account. She knows "tweeting" to simply mean bird song, and she would never think of writing on somebody's wall. This old friend of mine went out for coffee with me on Friday, and it was refreshing to share face-to-face conversation without the usual interruptions that motherhood brings—and without the digital distance that has slipped between me and friends both old and new.

This dear friend of mine, my 90-year-old grandmother, never witnesses the non-stop exchange of digital small talk, never sees the volley of information that shoots across my computer screen, never finds text messages popping up on her LCD. She's missing out on an unprecedented level of human interaction. But then I have to wonder: When it comes to human interaction, which of us is missing out more? She never meets the Niagra Falls of data that pours over the rest of us. What she meets are people.

At times, I wish she did have an e-mail address; I could just "shoot her a quick e-mail" to share the latest news and consider my granddaughterly duty done. I could upload a cute photo of the kids and call it "keeping in touch." Instead, what I'm forced to do is come into real, messy, inefficient human contact with her, and it's not always so easy. I can't limit her conversation to 140 characters so that I can get back to the dishes. I have to cover my mouth when I sneeze. I can't answer her replies in my own good time. I cannot multitask while sharing a mocha. Communication with my grandmother takes genuine effort.

So much the better.

Perhaps the greatest downside to all the tech-driven interaction is how little it cost us. There's not much emotional investment in a status update. Not much time commitment in a tweet. Small sacrifice in a text message. And a friendship that doesn't cost much can eventually seem to not be worth much either. Small investments pay small dividends.
But that's not to say that they pay no dividends whatsoever.

I must say, I'm thankful for the way electronic communication and internet "communities" can help maintain friendships through years and across miles. Saying goodbye to those I love has been too common an occurrence, and facebook does help—or at least gives the illusion of helping—to bring us closer again.  Just this week, my brother was offered a job in California, and when he and his family move, the separation will be a bit more bearable knowing that, no matter how far away they are, we can Skype.

Small consolation, I know. But it really does seem better than nothing, and maybe my grandmother will think so too, when moving day actually arrives.

Then again, maybe not. All that virtual interaction may seem like merely slapping a Band-Aid on the bleeding wound of physical separation. I don't think any of us who are being honest could say that digital contact can replace a face-to-face meeting. Still, I'd rather have a Band-Aid than sit here and bleed to death.

It's when our connections with those far from us prevent a connection with those nearest to us, that I think these high-tech blessings become a real evil. If I'm walking through life plugged into a Bluetooth earpiece, I feel exempted from acknowledging the people I pass on the sidewalk. When I'm too busy blogging to an unseen audience to find out what the kids are all arguing about right here in the same house, I've lost the real point of communication. When a stranger cannot ask me for directions because he is afraid to burst the earbud-bubble I inhabit, I've sealed myself off from the flesh-and-blood neighbors I am supposed to love.

Remember that commandment? To love my neighbor? It didn't come with a digital caveat. I cannot plug in and opt out. If he'd been grooving to his own personal soundtrack while texting the friends he'd seen ten minutes ago at the mall, the Good Samaritan might never have noticed the guy bleeding to death in a ditch. What's the good of iPhone contact if it makes me forget how to make eye contact?

Too often my virtual relationships interfere with the living, breathing, sneezing, laughing relationships made through meeting in physical space. ("Oh, sorry to interrupt you, but this is an important call...") I cannot maintain a healthy marriage simply by writing on my husband's "wall" three times a day. Or thirty times a day. You and I can both eat a bowl of Cheerios while we video-conference, but we have not had breakfast together. I can sit on my couch with a cracker and a glass of cabernet while I watch a live broadcast church service. But I can't trick myself into believing that I've just participated in Communion. I haven't. Not even if my TV is a high-definition flat screen. I cannot be there in spirit only. My spirit is stuck inside my body. It's supposed to be.

We're Americans. We're all obsessed with bodies—especially around New Year's Day, when ads for weight-loss products and workout DVDs fill the airwaves, and the word "sexy" flies through the air like the swine flu. But this body obsession seems particularly odd—or, perhaps, particularly obvious—when I notice how disembodied our relationships have become. Ever since AT&T redefined what it means to "reach out and touch someone," we've been losing our ability to do it literally.

Of course, I could have talked to my grandmother on the phone, and I do. But a voice heard from across a small table is far warmer than heard through a telephone receiver. This is why it was so refreshing to go out for coffee with her, my old, old friend—to share face-to-face laughter, to knock knees under the same table, to breathe the same air, to brush doughnut crumbs onto the same paper napkin. To step outside my digitized world into hers—into the unmediated, flesh-and-blood realm of true friendship—was delightful.

Sharing a Verizon connection cannot compare with the connection made through breaking bread (or glazed doughnuts) together—sharing a bite instead of a byte. It's something I should do more often.