Emily Stafford
One hour in my backyard
One hour spent outside in the cold of a Virginia winter is one hour too long for me. The saving grace of this experience was the snow on the ground. The snow cover hides the ugly grass lawn and makes everything look so clean and fresh. My suburban backyard is only about one acre, but the neighboring church had some property that makes it appear larger. As I walked along the trees on the border of our property, wondering what I was going to do for a whole freezing hour, I noticed it had begun to snow again. This made me regret not grabbing a pair of gloves, but I was too lazy to go back inside and root through the contractor’s garbage bag full of winter apparel in the basement. Eventually, I sat down on the small patio facing the more natural looking part of my backyard, lined with pine trees that block the view of the church’s schoolyard. The snow looked very pretty on the pine trees and I considered walking up and shaking them just to watch all the snow fall off, but I decided I was too cold to move. You wouldn’t think it, but snow makes noise when it falls. It sounds kind of like rain, but a lot softer. Virginia winters are funny; one day might be beautiful and sunny with a high of 50˚, and the very next day could be near freezing with wind chills penetrating the same jacket worn as the day before. The rest of the time I was outside was spent mostly shivering and thinking about how much I would enjoy this assignment if it were spring or summer.
One hour on my laptop
It’s no wonder I spend so much time on my laptop these days: I avoid public areas out of precaution, I dislike cold weather, and much of my work is conducted online. The hour I spent browsing the internet was no different than any other given hour in the day. First, I watched a video titled “Rich people have bad taste” by Drew Gooden on YouTube. This was a new video, posted only a few hours before I clicked on it. The video title basically speaks for itself: Drew comedically critiques the houses of the absurdly rich, including some celebrities. I have to agree that people with ridiculous amounts of money purchase the worst furnishings (seemingly always some sort of artistic statement). Next, I decided to browse Twitter. A friend from high school who is an airline attendant hates her job, someone with a bright pink cartoon cat as their profile picture has a fat pet cat, an artist compares their art from six years ago to their art today, a link to a GoFundMe page for someone who lost their job, an advertisement for The New York Times, and so on for the rest of the hour. It’s really easy to get sucked into an endless scroll down a social media site when you’re bored.
Two hours of my time
Overall, from this experience, I learned that I use senses other than sight more often when I am outside of media’s influence. I actually surprised myself with how much these two hours differed from each other. I didn’t notice at the time, but while writing I realized that almost all of the information I received outdoors came through multiple senses (touch, sight, and sound). Contrastingly, most of the information from my laptop was just seen. The hour spent outdoors also felt a lot longer than the hour spent at my laptop. I suspect this is because of my strong dislike of being cold and the normalcy of being on my laptop.
