Indigestion in the age of the 24-hour news cycle

I've found I need to go on vacation in order to unwind. It's impossible to do it around the house, where I am chained to this laptop - like it or not. I can't stand to see a headline on the crawl above this page -- there's one now! -- without wanting to pounce on it. And it did not used to be like this.

Twenty-five years ago when I entered the field, we didn't have computers; we had typewriters. Charming, antiquated, loud, clunky, wonderful typewriters. We purists pounded out our thoughts on a manual. I got through college that way. White-out (Liquid Paper) was our friend. When we were done writing articles, we had better things to do - like date, visit with friends and go for walks in the woods.

Nowadays, though, no self-respecting journalist is caught dead spending more than an hour away from her e-mail. I find that I can miss jobs, stories, gossip, you name it if I so much as take a long shower.

That's why I'm so sick at my stomach that I'm ready to leap off the nearest bridge, though I fear doing this might give an unfair advantage to the competition, who would no doubt write about my suicide and therefore grab a front page headline: WIEGLER FINALLY LOSES IT AND CATAPULTS OFF THE GW!

Well, I won't let that happen, of course, because there is Tums, a visit to the GI doc, and rumor has it something called meditation. And I've also heard it's physically possible to pull oneself away from the laptop with enough discipline, or at least a threat from one's boyfriend in the other room.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Generations: How a young millennial journalist makes (and gets) her news (part 1 of 2)

Image
Marissa Gamache will be starting her senior year of college this autumn, spending part of it studying in Ireland at Maynooth University before graduating from Bethel University in Minnesota. She is completing a double major in journalism and international relations, and this summer, is interning as a reporter on the government team at Transport Topics in Arlington, Va. where I am a business reporter. I wanted to discuss with Marissa how her generation of reporters sees journalism these days, where it's going, and how she fights the allure of getting all her news from Facebook . Marissa, when you think of previous generations of journalists, what words come to mind? I think of the 6 p.m. nightly news and my parents. Are they journalists? No. I think of old journalism, Watergate, Edward R. Murrow, and Bob Costas. Thank you. So, how do you feel your generation is changing the way journalism is done? I think we're on a minute-to-minute basis. I think we are expecting...
Read more

What you should know about homelessness

Image
According to Yale Neurology I am homeless . I say according to them, because the resident who saw me most recently noted that. I did not want to depict my lifestyle that way, but how else would one assess five consecutive nights without shelter? Although I make $1163 a month in Early Social Security benefits and am getting a small stipend from a cousin, it is never enough here in Connecticut. Between dental bills and storage payments to both the U.S. and the U.K., where I went to grad school, I'm tapped out two weeks after receiving my money. You don't want to lose even one night of sleep. Although you may think you understand how it feels, because you have traveled to Peru and experienced jet lag or enjoyed an all-nighter at 17, ending up at a pancake house at five a.m. and not sleeping (as I did once), you don't have any idea. After five nights of sleep deprivation, even if you can count backwards by 7's (as I did for Yale Neuro, at their request), you are confusing w...
Read more

9-11 Conversations, 10 years of memories

Image
Edward's cousin worked at Cantor Fitzgerald. I would hear about his cousin's death when Edward came into Barnes & Noble in Westport, where I began working in October, 2001 after my job in New York came to an end that August. Edward was very depressed. He just wanted something of his brother's, wanted to go back, touch the site. I believe he got a sweater of the cousin's. Then there was the time I was wrapping a child's gift. I smiled, "Who's it for?" The patron, stonefaced, told me "her father died in the attacks." *** Moving to New York in 2001, I had a choice of either living in the city or moving farther out into the 'burbs. I chose the latter, but commuted into Midtown Manhattan, where I worked as a real estate writer for Rubenstein Associates. This PR firm happened to have represented, and still does, Larry Silverstein Properties. I had no idea who Silverstein was, but I knew this was all pretty fancy. I also knew that New York w...
Read more