Where media-men and stringers sniff and point,
Where zoom lenses, recorders and coiled leads
Litter the hotels. The times are out of joint
But I incline as much to rosary beads

-Seamus Heaney

I’m feeling a bit carsick after a day of events that bear no relation to my reason for turning on the hotel television. After a fantastic hosted lunch enjoyed about an hour away, I climbed into a car that traveled at warp speed, gunning past slower motorists and swerving through rolling topography of the landscape. In another place located hundreds of miles away, on the TV I see that it’s a day of tension as the United States holds a dedication ceremony to mark the relocation of an embassy. It’s all just a matter of real estate of course—much like what happened in London when we moved southwest and opened for business in a still developing spot on the Thames. Except the embassy I am looking at on the screen is in Jerusalem. The real estate is of higher consequence.

The television programming is done in split screen—the left side shows the ongoing ceremony filled with speeches and sharply dressed individuals. Some victory speeches, many promises for everlasting peace. The right side of the screen shows a combination of black smoke in Gaza and scrambling bodies outnumbered by people brandishing smart phones to capture the entire thing just out in the front of the new embassy. This gaggle of people are holding up their phones, almost as if they are in the front row of a concert. Yet here documenting on the fly just in case it all devolves into something bigger. The BBC commentators cut in from time to time to give us, the viewers, latest numbers on fatalities that have now reached double digits. The entirety of the experience has the feel of a climactic movie sequence. Except it’s not.

And as I watch with worried interest, from time to time I find myself shutting off the TV in disgust…only to turn it back on again. I’m not saying that one side of the screen is more right than the other, but I can only stand to listen to political statements for so long. Whenever the TV is on, I routinely glance out the window and to my view of the Black Sea. I think about the day I just had, and the car ride I took along the Georgian coast where my host provided a running commentary of everything from the careful relocation of 100-year-old trees to “the occupied zone” just to the north of us.

The occupied zone. Russia, as a near neighbor, very obviously factors strongly into the minds of these people. As a visitor I am very much an uninformed observer, yet still one who is very much interested and somehow implicated—both with respect to how this particular country is evolving, as well as with how my own country is evolving—and yes even with the split screen reportage that I’m watching on the TV. From parts far and near we are all connected. I understand this concept holds validity in the larger cosmic sense, but at the same time I do feel helpless in taking it all in. I feel my small size in knowing that I am just one modest human being on an expansive and ever-turning planet of perpetual give-and-grab. And also sharing.

Finally, this real-life television feed, I can no longer watch. Maybe I too am watching in the expectation that something bad might happen. I flip the channel to TV5 Monde to see what might be showing for the francophone audience. Parallel coverage of Jerusalem, perhaps? Maybe at least a shift in perspective will be of some interest. But on the French channel they are instead broadcasting a story of the vanilla bean: how its synthetic recreation by chemists creates a component that is 50 times cheaper than the actual bean. They then move to interviewing vanilla bean purveyors in Geneva. People there will pay a high premium for a quality bean as the product is as treasured as truffles.

The Swiss purveyor then takesus to a pâtissier who is in the kitchen to create the filling for a family-size mille-feuille. He is straining the nectar from a handful of beans cooked in cream, the black specks look gorgeous as they float to the surface. Here, within these tasteful reporting boundaries, I feel no compunction to switch off the television and gaze at the sea. My brain is now less restive, and my acknowledgement of this condition makes me question whether my level of activities, interest and investment is insufficient. It’s not the exact same thing, but it is a bit like being a white person in American society that you know full well too often takes the easy option of turning a blind eye to everyday injustices. Because let them eat cake. Or in this case mille-feuille.

I don’t have a good, easily condensed solution for any of the sights that I have witnessed today. I do love my country, which is why I signed up a long time ago to defend all that we have created in the past couple hundred years. For now all I have is me here alone at the end of a long day, still feeling a bit nauseous from the car ride back to my hotel. Feeling sick but still finding that there is much in this world that is worth thinking about a bit harder. Vanilla flavored and otherwise.