Last night I watched The Irishman and will post about that as soon as I can.
Right now I am drinking coffee at a place near Boston while sitting next to a teenage girl who has been fidgeting for the last hour in such a way that I am tempted to ask if everything is alright with her. But this is the behavior of nervous youth magnified by the two screens she switches between and whatever she is listening to on her large, over-the-ear headphones. She is “here,” sharing this space with me only in the roughest sense.
Along the bottom of her Mac, she has forty or so icons for apps. Along the left of her screen are twenty-some-odd chats and portals of as kind I cannot decipher. She scrolls through two different feeds of videos which, as I have written before, allude to a world I know only as someone from Mars might know Earth because both are planets. Memes drawn from Gaza run into chicks on the beach runs into animations runs into games runs into someone lip-syncing, all this running partnered with captions like “that’s the end of the world” and “ha ha haha haha ha ha haha ha” repeated such that it forms a kind of pyramid shape on the screen.
For just a few moments her laptop goes white to reveal that she is supposed to be writing an essay on Othello for her English class.
Due yesterday, no later than noon, I have not seen her offer up a single keystroke since I have been sitting next to her. On her phone and her laptop it has been scrolling only. She has an extension, I am guessing. Or will need one. As will I.
From the play:
I do perceive here a divided duty.
To you I am bound for life and education.