Distance
Thursday, September 1st, 2005Katrina made the news here, though not in great detail. I hope all of my southern gentleman and bell friends are ok, and everyone else for that matter. Mal Mal how are you? I feel so isolated here, in a good way. It’s been all too easy to stop paying attention to the news. Everything seems so far away, like nothing can effect me here. There are no nuclear power plants, no nuclear warheads, very little pollution, no terrorism, relatively little crime, and aside from meningitis, no real disease threats. I have nothing to worry about but earthquakes, and I haven’t felt one yet. New Zealand is so far out of the way, that no one would really bother to spend the time, money or energy to attack it, save for maybe Australia, but unless we kick their butts in tri-nations rugby, they have no reason to attack. Maybe I ought to start reading the papers to prep myself for my return to the center of the terrorised world, our beloved nations capital, Washington, DC. I have a feeling it will be quite the culture shock.
I have to also say that I’m glad I went to Fiji. It’s a good place to retreat to when I zone out in the middle of lecture, as I did today. I was sitting around on the beach, cruising on the boats, and in general not paying attention to how encoding and retrieval interact in episodic memory experiments, until my friend asked me, “what did he say?”
“I wasn’t listening. I was in Fiji. Sorry.”
And one more note… I finally found a decent, and dare I say it, good cup of coffee here… at the cafe in the Maclaurin building on campus. New Zealand coffee doesn’t compare to Columbian or Costa Rican. But this cup was worth the NZ$3.60.
Drea