Word On The Street

I think I have written about the way man lags behind his own technology, creating it and using it ineptly for years. Many years after they should have known better, armies were marching right into machine gun fire. It's a slow process to catch up. Awareness is like that as well, it seems to me. When something happens in your life, it takes forever for the word to get around. While evidence of this has been piling up for some time, I only started to really thing about it the other day.

At the end of last year, I was under consideration for a promotion to a higher level in my improv program. I had been telling people with the caveat that it was not certain to happen. Sure enough, while everyone found out that it might happen, it got muddled along the way and many people never found out that it didn't happen. Even now, with the thing getting revived for a second chance, I still occasionally hear from people who think that it happened the first time.

Other things are like that. For two years I lived with a particular roommate, delighting in how no one could believe that we lived together. How funny is it then that some nine months after we parted ways there are friends who don't know about that or where I wound up and with whom? In the minds of many, I still live with the guy they were shocked to find out I live with. I would have thought that the word would spread sooner, considering how many people visit my home to drop me off.

It shouldn't be so surprising, I guess. I may be parted of a relatively tight-knit community, but we're in LA and we're all very busy. I must admit that I'm not up to date on the comings and goings of more than a few people, so why should I be more special to them than most of them are to me? The social networking stuff was supposed to lay everything bare and leave all of our affairs exposed to the world, but its capacity to do so appears to be stymied by our ability and inclination to keep track of it all. There is some comfort in that, especially if all it costs is that I have to remind people that I didn't get promoted in December, but I might be now.