Should it be called News or Expansions?

She is addicted to the news you know.
The morning traffic news wakes her up but she has no car.
They play some Jazz. She hates the saxophone, so she changes the station.
But she’ll always set it back to the traffic report for her morning alarm. They are always discussing the DVP at 6:14 am.
She’ll listen with her eyes closed, her brain racing, only saying over and over again that it promises not to fall back asleep.
During breakfast she resets the radio alarm and turns off the sound. She’ll eat cereal to the news telecast.
Her concern is the weather. Never the Middle East. She’ll listen to the anchor’s jargon, stories about children, quips about people’s idiocy, or extremes, or luck, or accomplishments. Anchors are the sports commentators for the ants that we are.
I think she would like to be interviewed with a proud accomplishment someday. That way she’ll be a bigger ant. She doesn’t know what she could possible be good enough at, so maybe some day she’ll save someone from a fire. She looks for them you know: People in fires.
She leaves the news on until the moments she leaves. In the subway she avoids the paper-based tabloid of 24 hour news.
Paper is wasted because she’s not the only one who wakes up to news, eats with the morning news team, and stares at the online news reels for most of the day.
But words make the commute faster, and some people’s jobs don’t have internet and so it is excusable. It is not excusable for her.
She gets motion sickness anyway.
At work she opens her station, highlights important bits of information.
And then she opens the most liberal city publication. It’s because they emote in their stories, and tell lies, and use words to communicate exactly what kind of ants they are depicting. The Right paper she doesn’t read because it’s like staring at legal jargon, and she doesn’t like walls that aren’t biased, white walls, with white information.
Sometimes, every Thursday, she reads the online publication of a free radical arts journal. They’re depiction of the news reminds her of demonstrations in Russia during the wall episode.
The artists harangue local and non-local governments with witty statements and textbook ironies. They’re all liars anyway. They lie by any publication, even their own. At least that’s what she thinks. But someone once told her that was true.
Sometimes too, when all the publications are read, and the CBC website well expounded, she’ll turn to real tabloids. Every female publicist will love a gay, and every male publicist is. And so they all love each other and coin terms and discuss the bigger ants who drink a lot, and do drugs, and spend their money on the cars that could probably clog the DVP. She likes the bias. And reading about simple things like that is very easy. She could never live like they do. She doesn’t really like sex all that much.

I’m sure if she tried, maybe just maybe she could read other things. She is addicted to consuming facts though. It is a pastime, one in which she spends no money and so it is healthy and encouraged. She doesn’t discuss it otherwise though. She does have a few friends, but they don’t like talking about the news. They aren’t really good at talking at all. I think she probably replaced that conversation with things that are verbose all of the time. Updated every 30 minutes with news, and so she enjoys the words at half hour increments and she feels loved.

She doesn’t like fashion magazines though – they are costly and ostentatious.

At night she watches many reality TV shows, people competing in any number of contests that she wishes she could do. But she can’t sing, she’s not athletic, she can’t dance and she doesn’t like wearing bikinis. And none of the shows are hiring a personality to host.

So she goes to bed feeling like a very real person. She is considered very informed. Maybe just maybe she could be interviewed on TV for being the most informed person in the world.

Let us all wish her sweet dreams about the many things she knows until the next DVP traffic report.