I cancelled my daily New York Times subscription. It was a bad habit, really, all that ink on all that paper. It was a burden, all those words and all that information. Every day… Read Me, Meredith. Read Me.
I mean, like I don’t have enough shit that I must concern myself, that I must also take mental ownership of all the shit that is happening in Iran, China, Afghanistan, Washington, the Gulf of Mexico, and Thailand (Oooo, I’m sick about what is happening in Thailand).
Every day it’s the same…. I hate to keep using this word, but the same shit. Politicians pontificating, fanatics subjugating, mongers mongering, idiots whining, people dying, children crying. Yes, the news is important in an abstract theoretical feel-good sense, but how does knowing the news positively impact my life? What motivates me to welcome the world’s problems and pestilence into my brain, so that I can strut around all informed and depressed and shit?
Besides, a cursory glance at my sparse postings as of late is evidence enough that, these days, time is a precious commodity. At the bare minimum, I have to work (8 1/2-9 hours), commute (~45 minutes), sleep (7-8 hours), cook and eat dinner with Mr. P (1 hour-90 minutes), and shower-groom-dress (~40 minutes). That gives me roughly 4 hours of free time to exercise/yoga, read, write, correspond with friends and family, maintain a semblance of a social life, play the viola, clean the house, do the laundry, and oh yes… learn the French language.
That last item has lately become a priority. After five years (!) of half-assedly devoting my attention to the rote memorization of acutely basic French, I suddenly feel a disquieting urgency to just learn the French language, already. I have indefinite access to a native Frenchman, and I’m still struggling to conjugate the imparfait? I still don’t know the French word for cupboards? For shame.
Something’s gotta give. I used to read the Times for 45 minutes every morning at the gym, either on a spinning bike or the stepmill. I was so proud of myself for multi-tasking, until the Times became an actual task. Ugh. The news…. again. For the past two weeks, I’ve been exercising while reading articles from Liberation, a left-leaning French newspaper that does not write with the same sort of inscrutable panache of Le Monde. Am I learning French? Am I exercising? Am I also sort of reading the news? Peut etre. Un peu. Ce n’est pas un malheur tragique mais un crime.
