By: Eden Anderson
Following a long day at my very taxing office job sitting at a desk, my evening can be broken up into four parts. Walking my dogs, cooking and eating, homework, and media consumption. After getting home and changing from business casual to sweats, my dogs, who have been following me around since I got home, see me put on socks and get very excited. They know what’s about to happen….a W A L K.
I’m lucky to have a trail across the street from my house that we can walk on every day. On weekdays I usually only walk them on the forked path for 30 minutes, but today, I walk past it; luckily, the portion of the trail I walk on the weekends takes the prescribed amount of time of an hour. Usually, during my daily dog walk alone in the woods, I listen to my favorite true crime podcasts about murder, but today I leave my air pods at home per the assignment description. Hamlet, Lizzie, and I get into our normal rhythms, both walking alongside each other and me monitoring for any other dogs coming our way as I appreciate the forrests beauty. It rained the night before, so the forest landscape looks different than the day before. Even though it can get muddy, I’m always excited to see how much the forest landscape has changed after a storm, whether any branches or trees fall, how high the creek raised, etc. But Hamlet, my hound dog, gets excited about the post-rain new smells. I watch as he stops every few minutes to smell the air or something on the ground, Lizzie gets very annoyed, but I don’t mind as it gives me a chance to smell the clean, fresh air as well. A tree that has been dead and leaning in a concerning way for a while now fell during the night. Lizzie, who is young and athletic, jumps over it while Hamlet wiggles his way underneath. After I carefully climb over it, I notice that my dogs are still and staring in the same direction; I look over and meet the eyes of a mother deer and her two fawns. Our two groups stare at each other in shock at how close we are to each other; they don’t break until we both remember to be worried—her for her kids and me for my dog’s inclination to run and bark after deer. I quickly pull my dogs away as they bark and hear the deer running in the other direction. The rest of our walk is calm and peaceful, and after we cross a creek muddied by a storm, we turn and head home.
After dinner and homework, I finally get some time with the dirty little minx of an app Tiktok.
With very little thought, I choose it to be my media of choice for the next hour. It was the obvious choice as it is my go-to when I don’t know what I want to do, and so happens to also be the greatest media time suck I’ve ever seen. I assume the position; Tucked into bed, I lay on my side in a fetal position and open my phone and let Tiktoks infamous algorithm do its work.
It really knows me because the first video on my for you page (FYP) is a cheesemonger explaining how the rind on my favorite thing, cheese, is formed and how it affects its overall flavor. As I swipe up, my FYP is filled with New Girl TV bloopers, floods caused by Ida, pet seagulls, Blackhead removals, Dog training, shedding reptiles, booktok recommendations, raccoon daycare, frogs being dramatic, and cats being evil and cute at the same time. For some unknown reason, the Tiktok algorithm thinks I have Curly hair when I have VERY straight hair, so I keep skipping videos about that. I share with my friend a suburu floating during a tornado (she has a Subaru); I like a video explaining that the infamous Pilot G2 pen is inferior to another as a reminder for later. My hour is finished up by going down a hole of satisfying horse hoove trimming videos. I close the app after I watch one my friend sent me
– “hey do you want some water” “yes” *Pouring* “that’s enough” *Still pouring* “that’s enough” “When will I be enough…?”
This experience made me look at what I do to relax and how much I need both to be outside and to escape into media to so at the end of the day. I also realized that I like sharing these experiences with the people I care about. I couldn’t wait to share my experience with the deers with my mom when I got home, and while I was relaxing watching Tiktok, my best friend and I were sharing videos we thought the other would appreciate. Both nature and media have made me who I am and continue to shape me, and I like that about myself.