{"id":626,"date":"2017-11-03T13:45:48","date_gmt":"2017-11-03T18:45:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bookofdreams.us\/?p=626"},"modified":"2017-11-03T20:32:34","modified_gmt":"2017-11-04T01:32:34","slug":"the-distracted-human","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bookofdreams.us\/2017\/11\/the-distracted-human\/","title":{"rendered":"The Distracted Human"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"IMG_0002\"<\/p>\n

The plane s<\/span>creeched to a dusty halt. I rubbed my puffy eyes. I had survived my first flight ever, one that lasted over twenty-four hours with a stop in Bucharest over Air Tarim, Romanian Airline back in 1998. My cheeks remained moist from the heartfelt goodbyes I had exchanged with my lifelong friends from school.<\/p>\n

I was a school-goer no more as I stepped foot in the crowded JFK terminal onto the waving hands of my father. In my handbag, I held tear-stained letters I wrote to all I had left behind.<\/span><\/p>\n

My first important chore upon reaching my uncle\u2019s home was to mail those letters out.<\/span><\/p>\n

A week later, my father and I drove to St Louis, and I started my first gig in America – an undergraduate student of Computer Science.<\/span><\/p>\n

It took me another week to buy an international calling card. On that day, a dense foggy Saturday, I slipped out of the back door of my apartment crumpling under the chill of Midwestern August (coming from the burning Indian summers,) I cautiously walked in between rows of cougar lake apartments on campus with all students sound asleep and only a hint of a bird chirp in the air.<\/span><\/p>\n

I reached a payphone, entered my pin, and let my heart hammer inside my chest. Across the globe, my childhood friend picked up and responded to my hello with a hello.<\/span><\/p>\n

I choked to complete the conversation. <\/span><\/p>\n

A week later, I received my first letter, my trembling hands opened and cheek-drenching tears welcomed.<\/span><\/p>\n

I was old-fashioned back then, still untainted by emails. I am old-fashioned today living in the same world somehow transformed away from the hand-written notes traveling at 35,000 feet across to electronically transmitted binary code messages over the internet lacking the gratification of the two-week long wait. Communicating has become that easy.<\/span><\/p>\n

With easy, come the blue-glow-lit faces, talking to each other through their phones even when it is just a table that separates them in a restaurant, they smile through the cloud on which they are texting each other from.<\/span><\/p>\n

The new human is distracted by the phone. And, the old human in me, can\u2019t forget the joy of ink spilling into a blank sheet of paper that took several hands to make it to the loved one.<\/span><\/p>\n

That is the paradox of life – where we are and where we used to be and what distractions we allow to tear us apart from our reality.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The plane screeched to a dusty halt. I rubbed my puffy eyes. I had survived my first flight ever, one that lasted over twenty-four hours with a stop in Bucharest over Air Tarim, Romanian Airline back in 1998. My cheeks remained moist from the heartfelt goodbyes I had exchanged with my lifelong friends from school. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_eb_attr":"","_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[3,44],"tags":[103],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6kaFb-a6","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookofdreams.us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/626"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookofdreams.us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookofdreams.us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookofdreams.us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookofdreams.us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=626"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/bookofdreams.us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/626\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":637,"href":"https:\/\/bookofdreams.us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/626\/revisions\/637"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookofdreams.us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=626"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookofdreams.us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=626"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookofdreams.us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=626"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}