Last night I had a revelation. I was watching a dance contest on a popular TV channel. A member of the jury - quite an exotic star in Romania, a Cuban dance instructor named Wilmark, living here for over 10 years. During a commercial break, I turn on the radio, and surprise: Wilmark has his LIVE Latino music show. No problem, the TV show must be taped. But no; the dance contest is back on screen and there, I see clearly: LIVE. Now, that is truly a miracle and we must thank the modern media for it: it solved the problem of space-time travel. Apparently, it is quite possible for a person to be in two places at the same time. I had the living proof: Wilmark was a juror in a dance contest on TV AND doing his music show on the radio. For quite some time we've been used to see everything through the eyes of the media. What happened in a faraway country or what happened next to us, on our street, in our block of apartments. We hear on the news what we should hear with our own ears, we see at the TV what we should see with our own eyes. We learn that a guy was arrested for abusing his wife and we jump startled to see that he's our next door neighbour and NOW we understand why his wife always looked bruised and terrified. We make choices based on what we see on TV: buy stuff at teleshopping, stufff we don't need, but that cute TV hostess was so convincing... We go to God forsaken places for holidays, spend a lot of money and come back frustrated, but, hey, the guy on Travel Channel said it was the coolest place for travel, quite trendy and fashionable for this summer. Don't we all go jogging till we have a heart attack, or exercise like maniacs hoping to get those splendid abs like Marcus Schenkenberg? Don't we let doctors cut us, and put plastic bags in us only to look like Cindy Crawford or Eva Herzigova? Don't we let the media decide for us how we should look, how we should act? Eternal slaves in an imaginary form of slavery without chains, without whips and prison cells. We are our own prisons, our minds and our egos are the chains that keep us tied to the ever elusive idea of the perfect look in the perfect light. And we get distorted views on life. We live in the Mass Media religion that says we must all look young, thin and beautiful, that a terrible accident involves at least 10 victims - anything under that number is plain and simple accident - and that if it wasn't on the news then it was not important. Remember the anecdote about the good housewife going shopping and seeing a guy kidnapped in a car but didn't pay attention because there was no TV station broadcasting live? And when we DO notice something and then compare it to the TV news, there is only the faintest resemblance. Surely, the reporter wasn't there when the woman lost her ballance and fell in front of the car, but he knows for sure that she was drunk, walking with a wobbly and uncertain step (she walked quite fine as far as we remeber, and in fact, had broken a high heel). And there was certainly an old, shabbily dressed woman who had memorized the car number. But old women are unfashionable for the media. So the tape was edited, the old woman with an important piece of information sent to oblivion. Or the camera zoomed in and got her out of the picture. And then I come back to Wilmark and his omnipresence. It is something unnatural and indecent in all these. A masquerading of life, a big joke where we all laugh and don't realize we are laughing at ourselves. And it is sad, not because we are laughing instead of thinking, but because we don't know what are we laughing at and when we stopped thinking. I have a sneaking suspicion that, when we stop laughing, we'll realise that the smart reporter is just a dumb bird, blindly repeating his "nevermore" and real life is an old, shabbily dressed woman, cast out of the picture.