11:27 p.m.
i find myself checking the news compulsively all day. I suspect it makes me feel more in control of everything going on out there. This is obviously ludicrous, but I can't stop refreshing the headlines. Egh. I need to stop.

i heard today on NPR that there's a town somewhere out there in the US where they pipe nature sounds, like birds and rustling trees, through speakers along Main Street. The mayor reported that this makes people feel calmer, and the crime rate has dropped. Woah! There's a correlation between nature and calmness?! And instead of just getting more nature, we're going to do an end-run around parks and all their pesky maintenance workers* and pollen and bees. I thought,
"ARGGGGHHHH - you couldn't just, y'know, plant some actual trees?".

This was too close to home after my freak-out at the lab-grown salmon the other day, when I suddenly wondered if I was actually living in a space colony in 1984. Piping nature sounds is another thing that I bet we'll do in the future when we all live in bunkers. Yikes. One day, they'll document all the ways we lost our connection to the natural world. One step at a time, down a slippery plastic slope.


*probably unionized

2012-01-18

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