Rishon Rishon

Down the rabbit hole

I always feel like I’ve fallen down the rabbit hole whenever I take a long plane trip. It’s just so jarring. You get on in one place, where everything seems perfectly normal, and a few hours later you get off and everything’s different. The climate, the people, the culture, language – after all these years of travel I’ve never really gotten used to it. Instead, I’ve gotten used to the feeling of weirdness at the discontinuity. After a day or so, if I’m in a familiar place, I become acclimated to the local environmental norms, so when I come home I have to go through it all over again. I kind of enjoy it.

But I haven’t been traveling much the last few years, in particular I haven’t been to the US, so I was reminded of a few things that I had forgotten. For one thing, after closely following US news virtually, I was eager to experience it first hand. What was I thinking? On TV, in the newspapers, the vast majority of “news” is: 1) Weather, 2) Human interest, 3) News about news, e.g. celebrities. Somehow I had gotten the impression that there was presidential election coming up, and that this time it was particularly exciting and portentous.