One of the pleasures of being out of the country for a week was being utterly unaware about anything happening back in the States. I had no desire to use an internet cafe or check my e-mail, and it wasn’t until our last day in London when we were browsing the Apple store that I realized we could check it. (I quickly saw that I had 49 messages and decided they didn’t need to be read just then.) We got a free copy of the Independent at our hotel every morning, which had almost no American news, and our hotel had the BBC but not CNN International, so all our news came with a British focus. It was so refreshing. All I knew was that Hamas had taken over Gaza and that Tony Blair got into a fight with the British press. Also, the Pakistani cricket coach wasn’t actually murdered in Jamaica but died of natural causes.

Today I returned to my daily fix of U.S. political news via blogs and online newspapers, but after a week away from it all, I had a fresh perspective. It’s so obsessive to follow every little twist and turn of the U.S. attorney story, the back-and-forth of presidential candidates, et cetera. Nothing new happens, so why bother? It all seems so… unnecessary. Why not just go to sleep for another year?

I doubt I’m going to change this routine, but at least I was looking at it differently today. That’s one of the nice things about being away.

Oh – also, looking at your computer screen after not doing so for a whole week is really weird. The text looks so small and sharp.

Oh, and also, we finally watched the Tonys last night, which we’d TiVo’d while we were away. Newsflash: Spring Awakening won Best Musical! Oh – you already knew? Sorry.