Skewed Views

                Driving from Panera Bread on Ireland Road in Erskine Plaza, headed north to IU South Bend, I sat in traffic pondering this journal assignment. I kept thinking in my head, ‘What does my professor want from this assignment? And why do we have to come up with different ways of seeing things? Is that even possible?’ Just as it appeared to be a dead end road (not literally because I was turning left onto Ironwood), I started noticing a pattern of people passing me by. The drivers of the cars headed towards me were being blinded by the setting sun across the horizon. The sun was low enough in the sky to force every driver that came hauling up the hill to pull down their sun visor. Not one. Not two. All fourteen cars that passed me in that allotted time of roughly two minutes pulled down their sun visor.

                This observation took me for a loop because I never even noticed the patterns of drivers around me. Normally, I am in my own little world in my beat-up mini-van and never take the time to notice those who are around me.  Sure, I take notice of bad drivers, speeders, tail-gaters and other obnoxious drivers but never just every day, normal things like pulling down a sun visor.

                What if those sun visors had never been invented? What would people faced with a blinding sun do? Cover their eyes? I sure hope not! We would find an alternative but that’s not necessary with the convenient sun visor that hangs above our heads everywhere we go.

                Sure, this may seem mundane and irrelevant to some people but this observation made me really start to think about how little I pay attention to patterns of people around me. From this observation, I ponder the thought of observing other patterns like which hand the driver uses to pull the visor down, whether they were in a happy or sad mood or if they were on their cell phone. (The latter frightens me and is technically illegal now so I will refrain from doing that one.) But anyway, I challenge you as a reader of this journal entry to take time out of your day to observe those around you.

                You ever wish you could return to being a kid knowing what you know now? That Santa Claus isn’t real, that things you order online don’t come out of a special printer at mom’s workplace or that those teeth you stick under your pillow? Yeah, they end up in your mom’s jewelry box. Wouldn’t it be awesome to return to those days of hopscotch and coloring books without caring about anything except your place in the lunch line?

I frequently revisit those thoughts in my head and wonder what it would be like to truly return to that stage of life and relive it. Not because I have any regrets but because I know now that not everything was a huge deal and that it would be okay to be late for school or that mismatched socks didn’t make you unpopular. I often wonder what kids these days see and how they view the world. Sure, they are much shorter than us but what would it be like to be that height again and see the world from that angle? Or what if a child took place of an adult in a workplace, sitting with their feet hanging over the edge of a chair in the corporate office?

Oh and to be able to ride a tricycle again and be able to take piggy back rides. Now a days, if I jump on someone’s back, they might wrestle me to the ground and ask me what the heck I am doing. I always heard the phrase, “Oh to be a kid again”. What if that was possible? Not necessarily a time machine but to be who you are now, but in a way tinier body. Maybe I’m not making any sense but I definitely have thought about this before.

                One word: Facebook. On the Internet, an average two hours a day, looking inside the lives of those we barely know, have met once or those who are closest to us. Facebook allows viewers to see inside people’s lives, including some rather private information. Of course, people can choose how much they reveal on Facebook but from what I’ve seen, people enjoy sharing a lot of useless information. This may not have anything to do with art but it’s a webpage, a social networking service that the majority of us spend a plentiful amount of time on.

                It’s funny because when we meet new people, we sometimes say, “Oh yeah, add me on Facebook, dude!” or “Yeah, I’ll hit you up on Facebook sometime.” This brand of networking has allowed people to view the most intimate details of a person’s life, including but not limited to, where they work, what they eat for breakfast or who they spent the weekend with. We share so much detail about ourselves that there is really no purpose to meeting someone in real life anymore.

                I read an article once about if we really put every single detail on our Facebook, documenting our lives, we would find out that we are quite boring individuals, unless of course, you do something really fun for a living like a sky-diving instructor. But that’s highly unlikely. Instead, what we do, as humans, is limit the boring activities of our daily lives and really amp up the exciting days of our lives. Doing such, limits what people can read about our lives and therefore, they get a skewed version of who we are. It’s all about perception and what we put on Facebook directly relates to how people perceive us. That’s why I am always very careful as to what I put on Facebook.