This morning we awoke in Cork City, Ireland shortly after a man shot up a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado. Due to the vagaries of the Earth’s size and shape, the time difference made it so we were able to watch & listen to the aftermath coverage live, in daylight with coffee, as the United States either slept or watched in wee hours.
We watched as we busied ourselves with packing for a return to Dublin, with my laptop on a table connected to the Internet. My children used that same connection to play Minecraft with their friends at home and Skype with their mother. SL and I have worked pretty much every day, responding to emails in the time-shifted manner of an international manufacturing operation.
All of this makes me very happy— I like it this way. I remember the opposite, when travelling to Europe in the late 80s, and trying to be in contact with home was a nervous exercise in coins and country codes and phone booths on busy streets. But there was something precious to that communication, in the way that anything isolated and elevated is made important, like a spotlight on a stage.