leaving for lebanon, i was a woman in a hurry. days would bleed into weeks, and i would swim in a sea of to dos, each demanding attention, each wailing to be crossed off the list.
and then, i arrived in that spectacularly wondrous levantine city by the mediterranean, and all was well. the days still bled into weeks. mafi mishkele. pas problem. no big deal. but then, these weeks, they began bleeding into months.
this, in retrospect, is where the trouble started.
living in lebanon, i grew apart with my most cherished ritual: checking the news every morning. it crept up on me rather unexpectedly. it began with a mild frustration at the unreliable internet connection (true story: when we asked for wireless internet, the landlady gave us internet chords long enough to reach every and all corners of the house. no need for wireless internet. problem solved lebanon style. and this is suppose to be one of the better higher end apartments in hamra. true. story).
note the chords connecting alexa’s robots to their mothers:
then i became accustomed to being in the dark. then slowly, i began to revel in the not knowing. it was sort of romantic, hearing of michael jackson’s death over the radio, in some taxi winding through the streets of hamra late at night – instead of getting an instant news alert in your inbox. it afforded you the grief of knowing for sure, without doubt. by hearing it over the radio drifting in and out of sleep and sobriety, you could give yourself the benefit of the doubt. somehow prolong the mystery and the awe.
anyways, i began to relish this new found game of playing dumb. in truth, i still don’t know what happened with the health care bill down in the states.
when i came back to toronto, i picked up where i left off and continued on with the constantly-being-connected.
but then the lost news began creeping up on me. for instance: brittany murphy? dead? no one told me! i only found out while flipping through the television a few weeks back (fine, last night) when a larry king live programme with the words – in big fat block letters – “DEATH OF BRITTANY MURPHY” caught my eye.
or that senator from virginia (or carolina? if so which one?) who had an affair with an argentinian woman (or was she bolivian?)? he even declared to the press that he had found his soul mate? i am majoring in international relations. how did i miss this?
and then came the worst. much to my embarassment, only recently did i learn of david rohde’s release. you know, the nytimes reporter who was kidnapped by the taliban last november only to be released sometime last june. thanks to the media blackout that included wikipedia, i had no way of knowing that he had indeed been kidnapped, let alone released. this is particularly mortifying for someone who professes to be interested in journalism. it’s kind of like being in publishing and not knowing about the arrival of ipad. or being a toyota owner and not hearing about the recall. or going to the laundromat without change. or being bill clinton and forgetting to mentally undress cute young interns.
these are the punishments of neglecting your google news alerts. oh cruel, fast-paced, tweeting, blogging, and real-time updating world.
</a
