The Internet at my apartment has been intermittently broken all week. This always sends me into a panic. I don't watch television, I have no roommates, and I have no friends in my city that I see on a regular basis. In my Web-less apartment, the silence screams deafeningly. It even makes me eat out a lot more, so I don't have to listen to myself chewing.

I've discovered I also have a sort of post-9/11 paranoia, thinking that some terrible calamity could befall my home country, and I wouldn't know for weeks if I couldn't stretch my arm through that Internet window. Who would tell me, five year old Japanese kids? I first came to Japan just three weeks after the Trade Center fell. If I'd arrived a month earlier, I could have spent that very moment fumbling ignorantly with strange coins, still trying to get a drink out of the vending machine of my hotel, oblivious to anything bigger. Instead, I watched it live on TV as I tucked some last boxes into my parents' attic, and looked at my one-way ticket to Japan suspiciously. Somehow I think my removal from all the events between the collapsing Trade Center and now have left my sentiments and fears trapped in that moment. I wasn't around when we dropped the first bombs, but I heard about it second-hand a week later. I still check the news sites every morning anxiously, relieved to find nothing has happened while I was sleeping.

There is a good side to being so removed -- one of perspective. When I hear about Janet Jackson flashing a Superbowl only one time, instead of from different journalistic angles every 2 minutes as I suspect many Americans heard about it, the event maintains for me the proper amount of unimportance. No one in Japan seems to be talking about it, but they are talking about Iraq and the environment and Kerry, and it's easier to keep track of what really matters. Still, I am relieved when most mornings' news tells me something only trivial, because it means there was no new tragedy during the night.

Comments

[Silverlotus]

Even though I am Canadian, I do understand what you mean. I tried going on a news fast for a little while because I was so tired of news topics presented both by CNN and CBC, the way they are constantly repeated and commented on by people who don't seem qualified, and the way bigger news stories seem to be ignored. Watching news from the perspective of other countries, like the BBC for example (which we get here on CBC) is pretty interesting.

I couldn't keep up my news fast long though. I was afraid I'd miss some big event. And, lucky me, it was the Janet Jackson "story" that broke just as I got back into watching the news.