I’ve been
away from this blog because I was busy completing a few other pressing writing
projects. I’m back now and plan to make
up for lost time.
Azza, my new
Egyptian wife, recently made a travel request in relation to our holiday plans
for next summer. This past June, on our
way to Texas, my birthplace, the two of us stopped in Europe—in Rome, to be
more specific—to do a little sightseeing and to visit two of Azza’s nearest and
dearest old friends. The stop in Italy
was also a way of breaking up the long-haul flight across the cold Atlantic so
that we wouldn’t fall down dead from jetlag along the way. Next summer, she has asked that we do things
differently. She wants to see New York
City, which means that we skip the layover in Europe and visit the Big Red
Apple instead.
Life is
full of wonderful coincidences. About a
day or so after Azza told me about her desire to see NYC, I was sitting in a
work-related meeting. All of us at this
gathering had laptop computers. The
fellow to my right was surfing the net when he should have been listening to
the speaker standing before us. I just
so happened to notice that he was looking at a live-streaming webcam of Times Square. I peeked at the URL and made a mental note to
visit the same site later that day and to share it with Azza too.
These
recent events have helped renew my interest in looking at webcams on the
internet. I used to spend a lot of my
online time searching for interesting ones and then bookmarking those—like this one
and this one and this one—I’d managed to locate.
I’ve long
had this strange wish, a sort of internet fantasy I guess you could say. I’d love to witness something embarrassing happen
to someone on a webcam. For example, to
see a stranger, his back turned to me, walking down a street or a sidewalk in
some faraway place. Suddenly, his shoe
will come untied or he’ll drop whatever he’s holding, and then he’ll have to
bend down to lace back up or retrieve the item.
At the instant he does so, he’ll rip out the seat of his pants, exposing
a pair of white underwear in the process.
Of course, he’ll be mortified and will reach around to check, with the
fingers of one of his hands, to see if what he thinks happened actually did.
I think it
would be such a wonderfully postmodern experience to observe something like
that happen. And I know what my reaction
would be too. I’d smile to myself and
then shiver with the realization that I’m living at a moment in history when
miracles really do take place.
