Living in "Podcast Time Zone"

In his book Eastern Standard Tribe, Cory Doctorow told of people who identify with those in a particular time zone, rearranging their own "day" to correspond with that of their tribe.

Lately I've been in my own particular time zone but it's currently about a month behind the rest of the universe.

A fistful of months ago I got a new music player which allowed me to greatly expand the list of podcasts I could capture and transfer to a portable player. I immediately went berserk with subscriptions and quickly had over 80 hours of audio queued up. At the time I was listening about 2 hours a day, 5 days a week. I was tempted to just throw it all out and start over. But I elected instead to "begin at the beginning" and listen to the stuff I had in more or less publication order.

I was actually beginning to catch up when the Christmas holidays hit. As usual during that time I had a lot of unused vacation to burn up so I took a lot of time off (as "off" as one gets in these times). I thought I'd catch up to real time with the listening. But lots of stuff took up my time and instead I got further behind.

When I got back to my normal commuting schedule just after the first of the year, I was listening to 'casts that were about 6 weeks old. At this point I'm up to about 3-1/2 weeks behind real time. So I'm gaining!

This has actually been useful, though. It has caused me to be quicker to hit the fast forward and next track buttons, jumping over the stuff that loses my interest. As I've gone along I've decided that some 'casts to which I had subscribed just didn't deliver anything useful for me. But I've also picked up references to new 'casts. I've also expanded the times I listen to 'casts.

So. It's odd to be listening to items that have references to "current events" that are up to a month old. It kind of gives me this ... detached observer ? ... feeling.