Part of my travel experience was crossing the International Dateline multiple times, gaining or losing a day in the process, reliving a date on the calendar or missing it altogether. One year, for example, I missed my birthday as I was fast-forwarded from the day before to the day after.
That experience certainly helped me empathize with those born on Leap Day. But it also is the closest to time travel I ever achieved.
Another memory of travel is days and nights spent walking around foreign cities in Europe, Asia and South America, usually with a new acquaintance as my guide. It would not be a far stretch to imagine I could have fallen in love on one of those walks, say in Brussels, Paris, Taipei or Tokyo; in fact, perhaps on occasion that even happened.
But since my memory is fickle and it flickers rather than illuminates, any reality it contains has merged with a healthy sense of imagination. That's why a certain kind of film resonates so deeply with me. A current example is "Already Tomorrow in Hong Kong," featuring lovely performances by Jamie Chung and Bryan Greenberg.
Chung is a San Francisco girl who graduated from Lowell High School in 2001. Her family immigrated from Korea before she was born. Greenberg is a Jewish kid from Omaha.
And, according to Wikipedia, they are now married.
The film is set in Hong Kong, where I have also walked around several times. It depicts how the pair meet as strangers and fall for each other during two random encounters a year apart. It is sweet, sensitive, subtle and hopeful.
And it will remind some of "The Before Trilogy," set in Paris in 1995, 2004 and 2013. In those films, another couple spends the entire film(s) walking around a lovely city, talking and falling for each other in the process.
Both stories are about human connection through conversation in the middle of being lost. Travel is often lonely; international travel especially so. Being alone in an American city is one experience; but being alone overseas is entirely different. You truly can feel lost.
Maybe when we are at our most vulnerable, we succumb to temptation or perhaps we find our true selves. Both could be true, or neither. In the end, sometimes we turn into each other's angels.
***
The battle over unionization at an Amazon plant in Alabama may be the most important class conflict in the country right now. The company has been hiring workers in droves for low-paid work in its giant warehouses that seem to be everywhere, which is how that one-day delivery service is possible.
In the process of establishing its amazingly efficient home delivery system, Amazon has grown way beyond books, which were its first product group, to the point where (guitar please) 'you can get anything you want ... from Amazon's restaurant.'
The problem is this represents monopoly power against which smaller companies cannot compete. I don't know about you, but I've been switching my online shopping to the kinds of companies available through Etsy.
Even if, as I wrote about yesterday, it sometimes takes 69 overnights before the delivery occurs. Just don't order anything perishable.
The news:
* It was 40 years ago on March 6 that news anchor Walter Cronkite signed off “The CBS Evening News” for the final time, stating his tag line, “That’s the way it is.” The phrase was more than just a signature ending of his nightly newscast. It was a statement that his newscast was designed to, as he put it, “hold up the mirror — to tell and show the public what has happened.” Holding up the mirror meant focusing on actual news, steering away from advocacy, and nailing down facts. There was a reason that polls of the era listed Cronkite as the most trusted man in America. He projected a fatherly personality and professional image. He spoke in a slow, deliberate manner. He imposed strict standards for accuracy and objectivity into his broadcasts. Every writer and producer on his team knew the perfectionist’s expectations and knew not to stray into personal bias or activism. (The Hill)
* "The stakes couldn’t be higher for Amazon, which is fighting the biggest labor battle in its history on U.S. soil. Next Monday, the National Labor Relations Board will mail ballots to 5,805 workers at the facility near Birmingham, who will then have seven weeks to decide whether they want the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union to represent them. If they vote yes, they would be the first Amazon warehouse in the United States to unionize." (WP)
* U.S. employers added 379,000 to their payrolls in February, increasing hopes that vaccinations and reopenings are giving the economic recovery a firmer grip. (NYT)
* Senate passes $1.9 trillion Covid relief bill (CNBC)
* How Tech Will Change Sex and Intimacy, for Better and Worse...(WSJ)
* U.S. agency probes Facebook for 'systemic' racial bias in hiring, promotions (Reuters)
* Millions of employees won’t get a tax break for working from home during pandemic. Companies with empty offices do. (WP) |
* Can Biden Keep Coal Country From Becoming a ‘Ghost Town’? (NYT)
* Overrule the parliamentarian. Or end the filibuster. Americans need a $15 minimum wage. By Ro Khanna (Opinion/WP)
* Covid-19 Pill Shows Promise in Preliminary Testing -- The antiviral reduced infectious virus in Covid-19 patients in a mid-stage study. Larger trials are under way exploring whether it prevents severe illness and death. (WSJ)
* Big Step Forward for $50 Billion Plan to Save Louisiana Coast (NYT)
* Pandemic Inspires More Than 1,200 New German Words -- Germans have a knack for stringing lots of words together to create new words. From Mundschutzmode to Coronamutationsgebiet, the pandemic has spawned a plethora of them. (NPR)
* Sports fans are much healthier and happier than generally imagined, science finds (WP)
* F.B.I. Finds Contact Between Proud Boys Member and Trump Associate Before Riot (NYT)
* A decade after Fukushima nuclear disaster, Japan wants to treat tainted water, release it into sea (WP)
* Indian farmers block highway outside Delhi to mark 100th day of protest (Reuters)
* She Was a Star of New Palestinian Music. Then She Played Beside the Mosque. -- Sama’ Abdulhadi helped build the Palestinian electronic music scene. Now she is at the center of a debate about Palestinian cultural identity. (NYT)
* To millions of people around the world, the young poet Amanda Gorman represents hope, change and the promise of a better America. But to a security guard on Friday night, the young African American woman represented a potential threat to public safety. The Harvard-educated Gorman, who won wide acclaim with her inauguration poem urging the nation to confront the injustices of the past and work to create a better future, says she was tailed by a security guard on her walk home. Gorman, who lives in Los Angeles, wrote on Twitter that as she approached her building, the guard demanded to know if she lived there. "You look suspicious," he allegedly said. "I showed my keys & buzzed myself into my building," the 22-year-old Gorman wrote. "He left, no apology. This is the reality of black girls: One day you're called an icon, the next day, a threat. "In a sense, he was right," the former National Youth Poet Laureate added. "I AM A THREAT: a threat to injustice, to inequality, to ignorance. Anyone who speaks the truth and walks with hope is an obvious and fatal danger to the powers that be." (NPR)
* Americans Scrambling For Covid Vaccine After CDC Director Announces Thousands Of Doses Buried Somewhere In California (The Onion)
***
To the sound of screaming
Through the walls it was bleeding
All over me
Unconscious as we cross
The international dateline
Let's end it here
1 comment:
You're a pretty good writer.
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