I was at work today for a few hours (not a whole shift, I hardly ever get to stay that long, since we’re never busy at the BK), and I started to contemplate the shapes of various items – namely, trashcans. Why are some round? Why are some squareish with rounded edges? Why are some tall and some short and some with foot pedals to open them and some without? I began to realize the complex design that goes in to a simple trash-containment vessel.
The trashcans in the kitchen are all round, but the ones in the lobby are square, and all are the BRUTE brand of garbage can. The largest two have wheels, none of the rest do though, even though it’d be helpful to wheel our own trash around the kitchen. It’d be so convenient to just nudge the can and have it travel seemingly on it’s own until it collides with it’s destination, some feet away. Why aren’t all trashcans wheeled? Would this movement be cumbersome if the can was low to the ground? I believe it would be, for your average human would have to bend down low to the ground to wheel the can, when it would be easier to just pick it up and carry it. Okay, so that’s one trashcan conundrum solved. Next!
I realize why the lobby cans are square. They must fit into a square box that has flaps that say “Thank You” on them. You push your trash through the flap until it falls into the square can. If the can was round, some trash would likely slip through the cracks and fall to the ground. But why isn’t this Thank You box round? It’s likely that it’s significantly easier to manufacture a box than it is a sphere or cylinder, but I believe this is just the beginning. If the cans and Thank You box was round, it wouldn’t hold as much waste as a the square, because four little slivers are lost when you transform a square to a circle, a prism to a cylinder.
Once I was finally able to get past the fact that trashcans come in different shapes and styles, my manager asked me to go do lobby trash. This is seriously the suckiest part of my job, because these square lobby cans overflow with trash by the end of the day, and I have to pull the full bags out of the can, tie it off, and throw it in the dumpster. I was in the middle of this menial task when, once again, my mind was lost in though about stinking trashcans. (See what I did there? Stinking? Trashcans? Trash? Stinky? Guys, I got this.)
All trash bags are the same shape, round. But some cans are square. Mind = Blown. It’s a miracle I got anything done at work today, thinking about trashcans so much. But as I walked out the building, wheeling the 50 gallon can (round, or course) I realized the design elements that go into making trash cans must be very detailed. As someone who doesn’t design trashcans (Is this a job for someone? I MUST MEET THEM!!), I hadn’t ever really thought about the subject before until today.
So I have one last thought about trashcans. They’re a very helpful thing.
Entry #2
Entry #2
Today, I began to think about Thanksgiving, it’s coming up soon, you know. But I have one little issue with Thanksgiving. I have Christian family members. Most all of them are at least somewhat religious, but then there are Them. You know, the kind who live, work, and breathe Christianity. This is my aunt and uncle. You may be like this yourself (nothing wrong with that). I, however, am not. I am atheist, which is often hard to come by in this society, for in this country, Christianity is Culture. They have their holidays, which other religions and not-religions celebrate as well, but they are still predominately Christian holidays to celebrate biblical events or ideals. We get off school and work for them. They have their churches at street corners, there are sects and cults and denominations. They dominate the United States as the main religious group.
Holidays, as I previously mentioned, are a focal point of the religion. Every Thanksgiving, Christmas, and Easter my maternal extended family gathers for a huge Christian Holiday Fest. There’s usually a cross somewhere, and my very religious aunt and uncle always coerce the entire group into shutting up while they pray to thank God for the food we are about to eat, and whatever else is happening that’s important enough to throw into the prayer. Then there is a mumbled “amen” and a mad dash for the huge bowls and platters filled to the brim with food.
These thirty seconds of prayer is immensely awkward for me, because I am not Christian like the majority of my family is. I don’t know whether to pray to the God I don’t believe in or bow my head down like everyone else, or just ignore them and go about my merry atheist way. I usually bow my head down to be respectful to my aunt and uncle, but I feel as if they are disrespecting me by this forced show of belief and prayer.
My aunt and uncle do not know I’m an atheist. They’d probably throw some holy water at me and pray for my soul if they found out. So I keep my mouth shut and bow my head, but I still feel as if this show of respect is a fallacy to us both. I’m lying to them, and I’m lying to myself. While this forced show of Christianity is horrendous for me, it’s disrespectful to my lack of religion. If I respect my family’s religion, shouldn’t they respect the lack of mine?
Entry #3 (Seven Days Ago)
Entry #3 (Seven Days Ago)
Seven days ago, the last person on Earth died of Encephalitis Lethargica, and now no one will talk to me. Because they are all dead. I am the last person to ever inhabit the earth, because all my fellow and not so fellow comrades have passed away in the 3045 Encephalitis pandemic. I, remarkably, was immune to the virus. I wish I wasn’t; for now I am alone, with no one to talk to me, interact with me, or have anything to do with me. There are bodies piled up in the streets, the feeble attempts of those who thought they had survived to move the dead to leave room for the living. Well, when the second wave of encephalitis broke out in March, all of the “survivors” didn’t survive much longer. But I did.
Encephalitis Lethargica is a disease that attacks the neurons in the brain and is much like Parkinson’s, but it progresses in the space of a few months instead of years. The infected eventually have such violent tremors that they appear to have frozen in place, and are unable to take care of themselves. Initially, the outbreak was minor; mainly only effecting poorer African nations, and the ill could be cared for by the healthy. But as the disease spread, there were no more healthy people to care for the ill. Everyone eventually died of dehydration and starvation, for they were unable to feed or water themselves.
As I previously mentioned, I am strangely immune to the virus, but I have yet to find anyone else with my same curse. Being alone is perhaps worse than death to me, for my only company is that of corpses. They aren’t very talkative. In the last week, I’ve started to wonder if I will go crazy. I believe I will welcome this feeling, for then I would be removed from my ever-unpredictable feelings and my lonely self.
Today, I decided to do something drastic: move. I currently live in Boston, and since it was so densely populated, it’s smelly with the rotting flesh. I am going to move my belongings to Wyoming, where I hopefully won’t have to encounter a body whenever I try to leave the house.
A huge problem is deciding what’s important enough to take with my on the trek across the country. A car is nice, but will I be able to hack into the gasoline storage of gas stations? I think a bike is the better way to go. It’s human powered, basic, lightweight, and can still haul my belongings. As I begin to pack, I realize how little I really need to bring with me. Mostly just food, for material belongings are useless in this new world I live in.
I find the baby stroller thing my parents used to put me in when they took me on bike rides, and I load up my food and bottles of water. Lots of water. I find myself locking the door of my house when I leave, out of habit. Perhaps if I return someday, my house and belongings will still be there. I hope so anyway.
I pedal down my street, stopping to have to move corpses out of the way to make it to the main highway. Luckily for me, about 100 years ago, the US government paved a series of highways that are like the transcontinental railroad of the last millennium. This will allow me to make it to Wyoming easily, and without the need for a map. I find the highway easily, for I used to drive on it often before the pandemic.
As they would say, I am on the road again. Goodbye everyone.
Journal Entry #4
One
of the biggest issues in life is being able to fit in. However, many of us also
have the drive to be unique. This creates a delicate balance of needing to
uniquely fit in… not an easy task by any means. This means you must create something
that is similar to what everyone else has (be it clothes, shoes, hair, your
personality…) but also has a little bit of your own, slightly different.
Think
back to middle school (for those of us still in high school, this isn’t too
hard), where everyone wore two brands: Hollister and Aeropostale. Everyone. If
you didn’t wear something from either of these brands regularly, you were
basically a social pariah and it took you until high school to recover. The
problem with only wearing two brands is that your originality is limited to two
companies that design and sell almost exactly the same things: jeans with their
trademark back pocket design, hoodies with their name on them, shirts with
their name on them, or jewelry with their name on them. Congratulations! You
have failed the originality section of your middle school life. You’ll have to
retake it in junior high or high school to graduate.
Despite
looking exactly the same as everyone else, most of us still managed to feel
like we didn’t fit in. Enter: junior high school, a modest improvement mostly
because your life was no longer dictated by what “team” you were on for your
core classes. Most of us finally discovered in this 8th or 9th
grade period of life we finally realized we didn’t want to keep spending $50+
on a hoodie with “Hollister” plastered all over you could buy elsewhere for
$20. And we didn’t care to be associated with the middle schoolers. When we
started buying clothes because we liked them, not because we were told to like
them, I believe a lot of us loosened up quite a bit. Real, genuine
personalities came out! Then we made more friends, and realized we didn’t have
to be Aero-llister sheep to fit in and be happy with life. You could wear
sweatpants twice a week and no one would care (three times though, and you’d be
a slob. We were still fairly judgmental). Two short years later, and this time
came to an end. High school was full steam ahead.
Two
things most people think about high school: parties, and finals. I, however,
think about changing social attitudes towards how you look. You finally realize
that you can pretty much wear whatever you want and still “fit in” and be
unique as well. And the beautiful thing is, you can wear sweatpants and
leggings as much as you want and no one cares.
Journal Entry #5: Thoughts on body
modification
Tattoos,
piercings, and other methods of body modification are very common in modern
society. They are used to express the owner’s creativity and personality, and
are done for many reasons, often personal or “just because”. Some methods of
body modification are just that: body modification. Others, however, can take
it too far in my opinion.
The two most
common methods of body mods are tattoos and piercings. I think these are both
acceptable methods of expressing creativity as long as you don’t go overboard
or do something that’s just beyond idiotic (i.e. face tattoos). Almost everyone
has some sort of body modification, such as even the most basic of ear lobe
piercings. I find them particularly boring, because almost every girl has them,
so I don’t wear them. I’ve also had a lot of allergic reactions in my lobes.
Recently, I’ve
started acquiring other piercings: two cartilage piercings on my right ear and
a rook piercing on my left ear (I’ve tried to include a picture below, most
people don’t know where the rook is on the ear, and that’s why I like it!)
Eventually, I want a nose piercing, just a little gold hoop or something, and a
microdermal somewhere (these are piercings that are embedded in your skin in areas
that a piece of metal can’t go through).
I also want
tattoos, don’t tell my mother! I love nerdy/science tattoos, and I want the
serotonin molecule somewhere on my body. It’s my favorite of the
neurotransmitters because my anti-depressant/anxiety medicine produces more
serotonin for my body, so I feel like the molecule is part of me. This is what
I feel is most important about tattoos and body mods in general, they need to
mean something to you if you get one. I don’t really know now this would work with
piercings, but I’m trying to figure it out.
Now the body mods
I don’t not like (bad grammar, I know, but that’s how it came out…) but
wouldn’t ever do to myself: stretched ears of any size, face tattoos, hand
tattoos, genital piercings, permanent cosmetics, and tongue
piercings/splitting.
I recently learned
about one of the more extreme forms of body mods. Called scarification, it’s
basically an artist cutting a design into the skin to create a design that will
scar over and look kind of like a white-ink tattoo. I find the thought of
getting sliced all over for the sake of modification to be horrible, especially
since I have a problem with self harm (not cutting, so don’t worry), so I don’t
want to cause my body similar pain than I cause myself.
My last thought on
body modification is it’s a decision you make personally; so don’t get
pressured into doing something you aren’t sure about.
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