Not sure what to write about today.
I haven’t yet flipped on the television to see what transpired while I slept.
I think I can pretty much count on 3 or 4 car bombings, general unrest in the Middle East and continuing coverage of the three young women kidnapped and abused over a 10 year period. That story has legs for at least another 3 or 4 weeks and has a salivating “angry-eyed” Nancy Grace chomping at the bit.
I did go through this morning’s newspaper, its pages still damp and cool from a late-night-early morning rain. But there’s nothing in there that I hadn’t already heard about the day before. It makes me realize how near-to-death print media is – and with that I imagine a newspaper in a hospital bed, over-bloated with advertisements and lacking crucial topical news nutrients; it’s editors, reporters, photographers, paper boys, print press operators and any other blue or white-collar worker associated with the lifeblood of the newspaper standing around the bed – heads bowed, hands clasped, listening to the foreboding blips of “relevance monitoring” devices, waiting for the inevitable and wondering whether they are properly trained, prepared or skilled enough to work in the world of virtual newspapers and electronic ink.
For so many people advances in technology have outpaced the speed by which they themselves are able to change. There is little doubt that the people standing around the dying newspaper saw the writing on the wall years ago, but were unable, unwilling, or just plain overwhelmed and frozen in fear at the prospect of having to change.
The world moves so damn fast.
You spend a sizeable chunk of your life learning a skill or a trade and then advances in technology combined with changes the global socioeconomic circumstances you and your skills are suddenly deemed unmarketable. Now what? Well you have to “skill-up” to be competitive in this new world. Forget the fact that you are 50 years old, set in your ways, and not too many years ago thought you had “made it” – you thought you had gotten over the hump – metaphorically speaking – but now when you look up you see this BIG ASS HILL, with marker flags waving in the wind, on them are words like Retrain, Retool, Back to school, New economy! and you are like “FUCK!!!!!!” (and more than a little bit tired) and then you say to your fatter, less motivated, less healthy, and more emotionally tired than you have ever been self “I have to go up this hill?”
Silly you.
Yes you do.
bendingtheneedle 