Keeping Up with the Juan-sons

Part of the hardest thing about being away for so long is the fact that we have little access to current trends in…well, most anything back home. Keeping up with music, movies and books has become a challenge one must proactively tackle constantly. There is a great way to remedy this: the internet.

I am one of the fortunate few who have access to the internet almost always; my host family has a connection in my host father’s bedroom and I have wireless access from the office at my high school.

[Note: let me take this opportunity to explain that by internet access, I mean very rudimentary access. Yes, my internet is faster than dial up, but not much more. Watching YouTube is a far and distant memory as it takes about 20-30 minutes to load a 5 minute video. Even engaging in a video skype call is oftentimes garbled is displaced artifacts and pixels; the call quality of voice-only skyping is hit or miss. This picture demonstrates the mess of cables and boxes, the functions of which I will never know, which keeps the internet going at my house]

So, being that I do indeed actually have said internet connection, I can read the latest on the New York Times website, keep up with Facebook gossip and even read music reviews. Being out of the music loop, at this point anyway, is one of the hardest things to deal with, culturally speaking. There is (or was) a great website called pitchforkmedia that specializes in independent and alternative music reviews. Although I don’t consider my tastes too outlandish, Pitchfork usually reviews all of the upcoming albums I am most interested in (and has done so quite respectably). I saw, just last week, that they had a top 100 albums of 2008. Great! I can see what I’ve missed since August without having to sift through all of the review pages.

Again, having an internet connection implies that, despite how long it may take, I can download some movies and albums. I decided the best way I could spend a Saturday morning (and afternoon and early evening) was downloading the three top albums as listed by Pitchfork.

The top album was Fleet Foxes’ self-titled album. After the first listening, I fell asleep. After the second, I was bored. The point of this post is not to review the album. What I am implying is that, after the second listening, I deleted the link in my web browser to Pitchforkmedia’s website.

Being out of the loop is absolutely ridiculous and boring. I really need some new music and have no idea where to start. I miss having friends that could just plug their iPod into my computer and download whatever they were listening to in a matter of seconds. But I suppose that is one of the many faceted sacrifices one makes when joining the Peace Corps.

But of course there are worse things. The volunteers of my generation are quite spoiled by large-capacity multimedia devices, such as iPods. I mean, I have over 13,219 songs I can listen to at the push of a button. Consumerism (and obsession-based collection) has transcended the material and has seeped into the world of media. I am constantly looking for something new (though I always take time to go back and spend some intimate time with my old favorites). But still, I feel a little guilt while I sit there, spinning the wheel looking for an album to listen to out hundreds that I have. This must be juxtaposed with stories from two of my former professors, one who served in Thailand and one in western Africa somewhere, in the 1970’s. The former said she only had a reel-to-reel of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and the latter had one Beatles cassette (as far as I remember). While the kind of meditative listening that would result from listening to the same album for two years is valuable, I think I would have to kill myself (as this must somehow violate the Treaty of the Geneva Convention). I need variety. I’m living in a coconut-laden jungle, I don’t exactly get the same stimulation I had in Minneapolis that tickled my imagined and self-diagnosed attention deficit disorder.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that, just because a volunteer has internet doesn’t mean that volunteer is getting up-to-the-minute American cultural calibration. Despite the best, fastest and most ubiquitous technologies we have at our fingertips, we are still on the other side of the world, “turning on, tuning in and dropping out,” so to speak.

I imagine that when I return to the U.S., I will be a cultural time capsul, a relic of late 2008 that still thinks that YouTube is pretty high tech.