ABSTRACT
Jenny reclines on a couch at home, alongside members of her family, watching satellite television. Surfing the channels, she wanders from an American soap to a British documentary to a Japanese music video. As her family tires of her incessant channel hopping, Jenny relinquishes the remote control and turns her attention to her mobile phone and incoming text message. Opening the inbox, she reads a message from her friend, Carmel. Jenny got to know Carmel at university in London, before the latter embarked on a gap year in Australia. The text tells of Carmel’s good news: she’s been accepted into a doctoral program at an ivy-league university in the USA. Jenny responds to Carmel’s text immediately, and is drawn into an intimate exchange of ongoing texts with her friend on the other side of the world. Her family, meanwhile, still sitting in the same room as Jenny, now drift into the emotional background.
