It’s only one day.

Not even a full day at that. From about 8:45 am to 7 pm, maybe even 9. But for that stretch of today, for that stretch of right now, I’m at an international conference where the building has no Wifi, and I have no alternative means to securing internet access.

…It is the longest day.

I do not know whether the Angels won and kept pace with the Royals and Twins in the quest for the second wild-card spot in the American League. I do not know the name of the new Taylor Swift single, nor what it sounds like. I have not been able to read about whatever bullshit my President has done since last night – a lifetime in which he could have threatened war or continued his attack on civil rights. I want to see if any new movie trailers have come out, even if I would be unable to watch them in the moment, given my current circumstance.

I sit here, in an impressive theater housed at the bottom of a fucking pyramid, half-listening to a bunch of largely-retired ambassadors and officials some 30 years past their professional – and probably mental – primes, droning on about nothing in particular. The scattered active officials who showed up offer only boilerplate speeches full of mostly meaningless platitudes. I have already fallen asleep at least twice during the proceedings today. Same as Yesterday and the day before, but at least events those days were held at the hotel, with its plentiful bottles of water and reliable, if not quite strong, wifi signal. Like my seat neighbor, I keep checking the itinerary, a futile exercise that only underlines the fact that two more panels – four more hours – await.

I want to send a WhatsApp message to the girl I might be starting to see and check how many papers she’s been able to grade so far today. I want to send a LINE text to my best friend and hear more about her progress learning how to drive – in Colombia of all places. I want to see if I’ve gotten word from my publisher about the manuscript that finally nears its finish line, or if my payment to my sub-leasor went through (I’ll be moving two days after I return from this conference). God help me, I want to check my work e-mail.

 With my laptop and phone playing the role of paper weights, my eyes dart around every once in a while. I want a glimpse of how others are processing – coping – with one brutal presentation after another, before I get the filtered, faux enthusiastic version later on in the day when my fellow participants tell me how much they learned and how insightful these banal proceedings have been. I don’t blame them for the façade of properness, not too much at least. I too will censor my impressions, though certainly less than most, as I am here as a “young scholar,” a “junior expert,” etc. The patronizing qualification, one I barely fit into at the age of 34, puts all of us in somewhat of a conundrum, pushing most to overcompensate in gratitude for being asked to even join their eminences, to hear their drabble, I suppose.

I do so little of substance on the internet and yet manage to spend so much time on it. I would be refreshing my visitor numbers on this blog, triple-checking fantasy sports teams, reloading time and again the front page of the New York Times and the Washington Post. All of these though pale in comparison to Reddit, a timesuck so severe I’ve sporadically taken steps to block my own access. Overall, indeed, the internet’s effect on my life is generally parasitic (even if the work I would otherwise be engaged in is largely hypothetical), but it would be the precise prescription for a situation such as this.

I am decidedly no longer young, scholar or otherwise. I knew of course, but It has only been affirmed by this conference. I shared a towncar from the airport with a 23-year old fellow participant and the words “I’m a foodie” actually came unprompted as she discussed why she wanted to try the local cuisine. At a session yesterday, a 24-year old participant professes his ignorance of the panel’s subject, then proceeds to offer his uninformed opinion to the room anyway. I sit now in abject horror as another young scholar plows through the moderator’s efforts to stop his asking a question with time running out, rationalizing it because “please sir, I’ve been raising my hand for half an hour.” I suppose I should be thankful for some form of entertainment.

It is kind of incredible how encompassing the internet has become in my life, in such a short amount of time – less than two decades really. When I was living in a college dorm, I had an issue with my desktop once that required me to take it to the campus technicians. I went back to the dorm sans computer and had literally nothing to do. I tossed a ball at the ceiling for so long that my dormmate left his monitor and suggested we play cards, clearly out of pity. In the 15 years since, I’d imagine my dependence has only gotten worse. I’d like to think that I’d at least go outside now faced with the same circumstances though…

It is 5:00 pm now. There is still one more panel to go, and I’ve spent most of my last few hours writing this blog entry when I haven’t been nodding off yet again. I would be more excited about the dinner reception to come, and in particular the promise of free booze, if it weren’t for the fact that I will not imbibe much, having had a long night yesterday and a hangover much of today. So I just sit here, semi-listening to this panel and then eventually the final one. I will leave this giant pyramid and walk across the street to the museum that will house the reception. And, if the museum does not provide wifi of its own, maybe, just maybe, two or three hours later, during which I have to spend time with terrible young people and senile elderly statesmen, I will be able to hop on a bus, return to my hotel, and finally rejoin the rest of the world with a click of a button. It seems a lifetime away.

(Photo by youngthousands from usa (IMG_3183), CC BY 2.0, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0, via Wikimedia Commons)