Time Travel

Thanks to five movies, I managed the 12-hour trip to Beijing just fine. Some oldies like My Best Friend’s Wedding, The Big Lebowski, Dirty Rotten Scoundrels and then a thoroughly uplifting documentary appropriately titled Lift about a ballet program for homeless kids in the Bronx. Also watched a bit of a Blues concert with Buddy Guy and Junior Wells. 

 

Left San Francisco at 7:30 am to go to the airport, 10:30 flight left at 11:30, those 12 hours in my movie theater in the sky, arrive at 2:30 pm Beijing time one day later on Saturday, an hour to clear customs, out to dinner with my host and his lovely 12-year old daughter who I had met when she was 6 (my last visit to China was 2018) and now had considerable English skills and was not shy about practicing with me. Settle into the hotel and then off to a vegetarian restaurant for salad, cucumbers, green beans, tofu, rice, potatoes grated to look like noodles— just perfect. Back to the hotel and at 7:30 pm (5:30 am SF time), finally got horizontal after some 22 hours without more than a catnap.

 

Managed to somewhat sleep through the night and now a day before me before the teaching starts. With all this time, thought I could catch up on e-mail, publish a blog, plan my class and such before meeting a friend for lunch. But though my hotel has Wi-Fi, a bit of a rude awakening that when I sign on to my AOL account, it says China will no longer accept Yahoo. Did Yahoo buy AOL? Well, I could look it up, but when I go to Google Chrome, nothing opens there. No access to Youtube and Stephen Colbert, no direct route to Wikipedia and such. Likewise, my Facebook account doesn’t open nor does my Blogspot account. I can’t use WhatAp for phone messages or calls and the only line to the outside world is e-mail on my phone. 

 

So suddenly, I’m back in 1990, returned to that time when all that has woven itself inextricably into our day-to-day, hour-to-hour, minute-to-minute life, was simply not widely available. Part of me should feel panicked, as I feel dependent on e-mail for keeping in touch both personally and business-wise, on Youtube for a few things to show in my class and Google search in general for some information I might need for teaching. 95% of the phone messages I can’t open without being charged are the geometrically expanding political pleas, so no love lost there. Facebook is somewhat nice to see what friends and colleagues are doing, but hey, I can certainly do without it. I can write these Blogposts and yes, it doesn’t feel quite as satisfying if I can’t post them until two weeks from now, but no one is going to care that much. 

 

In short, it’s back to the way I’ve already lived some 40 or 50 years of my life and back to the way humans have lived for a few hundred thousand years before the electronic revolution. Not only is it just fine for the moment, but it is liberating to break myself of the habit of checking my phone or e-mail or getting my two-minute hit of Facebook comedy or Youtube entertainment. Yes, I will talk to my host about some workaround (VPN?), but today is Sunday and why not enjoy the needed rest from the plugged-in culture, to sit more wholly in my own thoughts and feelings and notice more carefully the world around me as I go to walk around the neighborhood.

 

Which I now will do.   (8/18)