Ah Venice

So.......
Tomorrow is my first day off in over two weeks and I plan to sleep and drink away a considerable amount of it. I'm feeling a bit fatigued. Not from work, or from training. Mostly from this world around me. I think it's the noise. There are so many people yammering at once about nothing at all... on TV, on the radio, even on the Internet (yeah, I know, pot and kettle, but you can't technically hear me typing so this doesn't count as yammering) I just need some blessed silence.

So I'm retreating more and more from the 'new' in all things media, and as such I'm finding many authors and subjects I seemed to have missed in my 23+ years of schooling. Today's find was Tennyson. Excellent stuff so far.

Sometimes I wonder if I'm taking a road less traveled in my desire to connect more with the past than the future with regards to music, art, and literature or if the men and women who were dubbed 'classicists' at the turn of the last century were simply feeling the same as me about the new age of cars, jazz, and machinery. It's not that I mind technology (he types on his Pentium Zillion+2 computer while listening to digital music on his ipod). Not so. It pays my salary, makes my food, heats my house, entertains me and wakes me up in the morning.

I think I have more of a problem with people's reactions to these things. More to the point, I have issues with being constantly bombarded with voices and 'communication' at every turn. I am of the opinion (especially during election season) as is Whitney and many other people I know that the 24 hour news cycle is destroying this country. The need to fill ever hour with some sort of information has caused all telecommunications hell to break loose. Now reporters feel the compulsion to report EVERYTHING to their audiences, no matter how awful, vapid, useless or trivial it may be. "The people have a right to know"... Indeed. The people, more often than not, would be better served with taking care of their own lives than worrying about others. Remember when you were young and you played that game "telephone" where ten people sit in a circle and one person whispers a statement into his neighbor's ear, then it's passed around the circle from person to person until it gets back to the person and you see how mangled the original statement has become? It's like that with satellites.

And let's face it, warnings against gossip (which is exactly what the majority of the "news" we get is, glorified, re-fried, dolled-up gossip) aren't exactly a new invention. The Bible even warns against it many times.

Wow, I'm like an angry old woman. I started this post talking about my day off and it became a soapbox rant about the evils of mass-communication.

Do I have a sense of irony or what?