Shattered innocence, shattered camera

Say what you will about the Germans, but they're brilliant at coming up with complex emotional words. Here are a few of my favorites, (some courtesy of this BBC article):

Schadenfreude: n. pleasure derived from the misfortune of others
ex.: "And there she went, flying headlong into the muddy puddle in all of her Prada finery; I had to admit to a bit of schadenfreude.

Kummerspeck: n. literally translated, "grief bacon." The weight gained from emotion-related over-eating.
ex.: "What you're seeing here [grab tummy flab and wiggle it] is a bit of the ol' Kummerspeck from when Axle dumped me."

Drachenfutter: n. translates literally as "dragon fodder." The gifts with which guilty husbands try to appease their wives.
ex.: Sanjay's roses after the extended business trip to Thailand were immediately recognized for what they were: mere Drachenfutter."

Today I challenge the Germans to come up with a multi-syllabic humdinger for a brand new, highly complex emotion I have only recently experienced for the first time: the sickening feeling that comes from the realization that a friend, a confidant even, harbors a whole set of deeply held, deeply whacky, deeply uninformed political and social opinions that run completely counter to the pillars of your own moral identity.

If possible, Germans, include the element of not being able to say anything in reaction to this friend's crazy diatribe for fear of setting her off, or encouraging her to reveal her plan for widespread ethnic cleansing. If at all possible, this word should include a kind of meta-awareness of oneself while in the act of discovering this craziness, as in, "Does my face register the horror I'm feeling? Can she tell I'm about to fall off my seat into a pool of my own panic-induced vomit? Make a neutral face, make a neutral face..."

In addition, I turn to the Far East for help: Taiwan, would it be possible to develop a kind of purse-sized Roman candle that could be quickly and easily lighted as a distraction when conversations get way too heavy, way too fast? "Well, I think as far as Iran and Syria go, we should-- Whoa! Look! Fire!" They could even come in packs, like cigarettes. Maybe Marlboro would go in on this. "Social Distraction 100's: Create a diversion, escape, and then have a real cigarette."

In other news, I damaged our camera over the weekend. Accidentally, but still. For a childless couple like Pants and I, this is the equivalent of saying "I dropped our newborn on its head." We reacted accordingly. If I were in kindergarten today and the teacher encouraged me to draw a picture of how I feel, I would draw a giant gray thunderhead spewing lightening bolts into a huge pile of poo.

I'm going to send the camera off to a place in Illinois to see if it can be fixed, but since it hit a concrete patio (since I hadn't put it in its case and wasn't watching out for it while it perched all lonesome by itself on the edge of a table at a wild party), the prognosis is sketchy. It still takes pictures and downloads them, but it won't zoom, scroll through previous pictures, or allow me to use any of its four (crucial) function buttons.

I once knew someone who broke his digital camera. He was a nice guy, but he was also much too confident in his own ability to fix tiny precision electronics, and I watched in tight-lipped anxiety as he ignored my warnings and took the camera apart. There are screws in these things that you could inhale and not know it, there are springs that look like electron shavings-- in short, there's no way in hell you would know whether you're looking at splinters of a broken part, or a perfectly fine, perfectly whole part. By the time this young man had finished his "repair" job, the only thing the camera did was flash, and even that was heroic.

So when I'm envisioning this repair facility in Illinois, I'm picturing a zero-gravity environment lit by massive klieg lights, everything else a brilliant, sterile white, with goggled technicians floating around wielding giant precision tweezers, and then a huge filtering apparatus for sifting the spare screws out of the piles of DNA sloughed off by the workers at the end of the day. Shit can't be cheap, in other words.