The only thing remote is the connection

Subject: Don’t Freak Out.

I was halfway across the world, halfway around the clock, when I saw that header on an e-mail from my 14-year-old daughter back home in Los Angeles.

Now, I’m a big fan of the Internet. I carry my BlackBerry with me to the supermarket, never mind all the way to India. I have instant messaging and a Facebook page. As a journalist, I appreciate the e-mail dispatches and cellphone photographs that people have sent from the Myanmar protests or the London Underground bombings.

But sometimes, the world feels a bit too connected.

My stomach clenched as I ran through the possible reasons for a freak-out. Not a death in the family, or they would have called. My daughter probably would save a bad grade for when I got home. A body piercing?

I wondered whether this news was going to be truly bad or merely irritating, and whether I really needed to know it right now. I doubted it was something I was going to be able to do anything about as I boarded a flight to Islamabad. More likely, I was being softened up: Tell her now, give her time to get over it before she gets home.

Whatever happened to getting away from it all?

I was reminded of a time about 10 years ago when a colleague and I were driving across the Jordan River. The biblical waterway had been reduced to a disappointing trickle, but still I thought it was exotic and remote -- until my friend’s cellphone rang. Back then, cellphones were the size of a shoe and he dug his out of a knapsack. It was his mother.

This summer, I sent my 16-year-old daughter, Sara, to El Salvador, trying to get her away from our privileged Los Angeles lifestyle for a while, only to be reminded by her e-mails how hard it is to detach. Not only did she receive daily (hourly?) updates from her friends on all of the very important social events she was missing, but she was able to keep me apprised of her mosquito bites and other subtropical miseries.

“Oh my God,” she wrote at 5:08 p.m. on Aug. 13. “So yesterday i was lying on my bed watching stuff on my computer and i look up and on my bed there is a baby lizard, yes A LIZARD. i almost died. like literally, i am lucky to be alive right now. i mean how many ppl find lizards in their beds. i had a heart attack. lucky i am okay. . . .”

“Lucky it wasn’t an iguana,” I e-mailed back.

No one in the family suffers from e-mail understatement, the atonal writing that bedevils so many Internet correspondents. If anything, we over-telegraph.

In the last week, my brother has been sending me daily e-mails from Paris, complete with photographs taken from his BlackBerry-cellphone-camera. I have been on the trip with him, museum by museum, pastry by pastry. Even on what passes for a bad day in Paris:

“This morning I tried a new boulangerie in the spirit of adventure, to try a different croissant, and it was inferior to the other ones. Still we decided to try and make the best of the day and walked to the Rodin Museum nearby. . . .”

When I traveled in Europe after high school and in Latin America after college, I sent a letter or postcard home each week to let my parents know I was alive and still had at least enough money for stamps.

They might have liked to hear from me a little more often, but I was looking to get away from it all in the wilds of Oaxaca. I wanted to disappear into another time, not to stay connected with friends and family back home. That seems almost impossible today.

The upside of e-mail is that it allows me to keep in close touch with correspondents in dangerous places. I get about a hundred e-mails a day, many with important information from remote corners of the world. The downside is that I am never quite lost when I’m the one in a seemingly remote corner of the world.

On that flight to Islamabad, I could have shut down my BlackBerry and saved the e-mail for later. Theoretically. But take note, all you e-mail scammers: Not many people can resist the headline “don’t freak out.”

I took my seat and opened the e-mail. First there was a warmup on how she was sorry she had missed my call earlier, but that she’d been at the movies. Then a list of friends who had also gone to the movies.

I got more nervous when she repeated the warnings.

“Don’t freak out, don’t worry, everything is under control. While reading this, stay calm.”

Too late.

“Your car got totaled.”

WHAT?

“Sara wasn’t driving. No one got hurt.”

Phew.

Then the story. My car was parked on a busy street and someone had plowed into it. The driver wasn’t hurt and he had insurance, but the car was definitely a goner.

“Sorry about your car but there are many things to be glad about (pollyanna outlook).”

She helpfully listed them:

Sara wasn’t driving

No one got hurt

We don’t have to pay for anything.

Prius?

The flight attendant was telling passengers to shut off all phones and electronic devices. I had just enough time to read the last bit:

“ok. thats the end of our crazy night. i love you. oh i took a math test today and it was really easy. . . . ok xoxo anna”

marjorie.miller@latimes.com

Miller is The Times’ foreign editor.