Two Hours

James Charles only nude has been posted to Twitter. It seems Kevin Heart has sustained severe back injuries in a serious car crash. Newsweek reports on a Florida man who genuinely believes that the United States military could poor ice into the ocean or fly airplanes around hurricane Dorian to decrease its impact. A perpetual cycle of second place in Dota Underlords must require enemy team awareness to break. Halo original controls are difficult to use, but the universal zoom and shoot is an easier control layout. Grenades never go where you want them to, and grunts never seem to die as easily as advertised. The shotgun kills in one hit. WKRN reports that Texas Republican Matt Schaefer believes prayers are the solution to mass shootings, not gun laws. Sciencemag recognizes bananas as the most important fruit for food and economic reasons, and its future is uncertain due to climate change. They die quickly if shot in the back of their triangular heads. On YouTube, an angry customer crawls through the drive through Popeyes window to assault an employee upon being given the news that they were out of their newly famous chicken sandwich. The new Joker movie is praised by critics with a fresh 89 percent on Rotten Tomatoes. Plasma swords have limited ammo. The Weather Channel app displays that there will be isolated thunderstorms tonight before midnight. It’s hard to fight the flood with a sniper rifle.

The crickets are chirping as a bumble bee hovers around a redbud in my backyard, searching for anything now that the flowers are gone. It roams about the hearts and searches tirelessly for one to claim as its own. Eventually, as if struck out of the sky by the hand of God, it falls through the air like a maple seed and meets its fate on the ground below. Flies and wasps enjoy the company of the hearts as well and seem quite unmoved by the dramatic event. In the meantime, the crickets keep on chirping. The forested island in the middle of an asphalt sea is the stage from which the birds hold their evening choir. A young chestnut grows next to the stump of its predecessor, unaware of the blight that will soon take its life. A beech stands grandly in the center of the island, unmarked by human knives as young romances burn all around it. A mosquito lands on my left arm and I take its life without thinking twice. Its corpse falls to become part of the forest floor as I continue on to observe the oaks that hide their treetops with vast lower branches and the people who have never noticed.

I learned today that people can be painfully ignorant, and stubborn. As always there is a story that makes you wonder how people can think what they think or do what they do, and a story that makes you realize that the Earth in 30 years isn’t going to be the one we know today. Watching a video of someone fighting over a chicken sandwich made me want one, and so I went to Popeyes and found that they were out of sandwiches as well. I think the video has done just as good of a job of advertising as Popeyes could have. My time outdoors in nature was more enjoyable, and I got to experience natures indifference and beauty. Many people live in my neighborhood, yet I may have been the only one who has truly gone out to enjoy the natural spaces scattered amongst the asphalt and concrete. I’m glad I chose to do it here in the place where I live than to go to a designated natural appreciation zone like a park. The media I experience today was full of chaos, but when I went outside to spend an hour alone with my thoughts, I found that I feel more at peace in natures chaos.

Andrew Heaney

To begin, I should say that I am a massive film buff, and thus decided to see what and how I could obtain information for watching an hour’s length of my favorite film; Akira Kurosawa’s 1954 epic Seven Samurai. The film is three hours and 27 minutes long, and is subtitled in Japanese. The second hour, which is the portion of the film that I watched, is full of “show, don’t tell” moments. The information I received about the world of feudal Japan, a topic I know very little about as it stands, as well as the different class system between Samurai and farmers, is fascinatingly shown through character’s reactions and implied through characters asking questions rather than expository dialogue or a less subtle flashback scene. Furthermore, the cinematography and sound of the film as well as the incredibly directed performances, help show what characters are thinking or trying to do. A great example is from my favorite character of all time, Kikuchiyo, played by legendary actor Toshiro Mifune. His exaggerated body language and tone shows everything you need to know about him and what he will do, before he says a line of dialogue.

I later decided to find my way through nature and hike a large portion of Burke Lake Park, which took me a full hour to do. What I obseved was fairly astonishing. This includes seeing the horrible state of the excessive algae in the lake, observing a large amount of fish take shelter away from the algae, and witnessing multiple flocks of Canada geese try to forage away from the algae. This shows that the lake is in horrendous condition, and I learned this simply through observing the animals and the water of the lake. I observed many other things as well, including hearing different species of songbirds, corvids, and other birds call, seeing some trees do better than others in their growth, and observing Grey and Fox squirrels as well as Eastern chipmunks forage for nuts and acorns.

With all of this being said, despite learning a large amount of information while watching the aforementioned film, I feel like I gained far, far more information in nature than watching a single film. It is quite difficult to describe my reason as to why, other than a quantitative reason that I simply learned more in nature for an hour than watching an hour’s worth of a film about Samurai helping farmers from the threat of bandits. In conclusion, I feel that the screen-less environment that is nature can be a very educational place to be, far more than anything a screen-filled environment, such as a television at home, can.

Rilee Hupart

In my one hour of technology I spent most of my time watching YouTube videos. Then I listened to music and scrolled through Facebook. I like to watch YouTubers play video games because I feel like it’s easier to watch them play than to try myself. It would take me a lot longer to play a video game because I would get to addicted to playing. I feel like that happens to everyone when they play a new game or find something new to do. Everyone loses track of time because they get to wrapped up in whatever they are doing. I don’t let myself play video games anymore because once I start playing, I won’t stop for a long time and then I realize it’s 4 in the morning. After that, I watched Marvel edits because I like watching Marvel videos and it also helps me find new songs to add to my playlist. Then I scrolled through Facebook and looked at what my friends and family posted.

            In my hour of being in nature my mom and I went to the Neabsco Creek Boardwalk for the first time. It opened on June 3^rd of this year. We ran into a father and daughter that were taking pictures of tree frogs and they told us what kinds of animals to see while on the boardwalk. They were at the boardwalk the day before and saw an eagle and turtles. We didn’t see any eagles or turtles on our walk unfortunately. The two main attractions of the walk were a light blue frog and a big black and yellow spider. We also some finches and some black and red colored birds. The trail itself is three and a half miles long but we didn’t walk the entire way. We stayed out there for about an hour and half before we went back home. When the weather becomes cooler and when I’m not on crutched I want to go back and see what other animals are out there.

            Overall, I enjoyed my time in nature more than I did scrolling though my phone. While I find listening to music comforting and relaxing, I’m still indoors. Walking outside was much more relaxing because of the fresh air and being able to experience the beauty and tranquility nature has to offer. Nature is also better because I got to see things that I haven’t seen before. I have never seen a blue frog or a giant spider so seeing them with my own eyes was a cool experience. It’s much better to see it in person than looking at a picture or video.

Essam Temuri

Laying down on my bed, overlaid with black and silver sheets, messily spread out over the bed, my smart tv blares the youtube app through its small speakers. Definitive clicking is hard to discern over the loud fans running throughout my small room — for I tend not to turn on my A.C. — as I press the arrows on the remote, scrolling through the various videos that I’ll watch, maybe. Most of them deal with video games, some sport games, but others, story-based games that are slower-paced. I click on one of them, a video that showcases the story of the video game Journey, a game that features a silent protagonist that traverses through a vast desert, wondering what happened to his society —  a society that was once reaped with gargantuan monuments and many individuals just like him, all flourishing, only to fall without the monuments intact, every one of them covered in sand.

            Indeed, it’s strange that I chose to watch this once again, and then again, and then again. For, I don’t usually come back to stuff unless there’s something deeply going on in my thoughts. I mean, beforehand, I was wafting through my twitter feed for the past 30 minutes, flowing through the discourses of the day, observing the hate-filled vitriol crawling through my phone, demanding me to listen to every news that dealt with the environment. It was painfully overwhelming. So, I decided to tune into Journey once more, a perfect allegory for climate change — as I see it.

            See, I needed hope, some optimism in my life, after watching the Amazon forest fires, the polls of the Canadian elections, which showed the Conservatives and Liberals nearly tied, and watching the progress of Hurricane Dorain — a particular gauge to observe the extreme effects of climate change that are already occurring, and which will only get worst in the future. So, I look at Journey, the video game, one more time, on a beautiful Saturday morning that has the vibrant rays of the sun penetrating through my window, whitening my entire room as I stay fixated on the massive mountain summit that the protagonist of the game has to reach, particularly to understand some form of deeper knowledge — perhaps about its society, or maybe about something bigger. But, the knowledge seems almost elusive, even when the protagonist reaches the top of the summit, crossing into that blinding white light that seems like another world, one filled with less obstacles.

            That’s when I turn off my t.v., and head outside — without my headphones, or my phone — putting on my red and white shoes as I exit from my wooden, burgundy door. I head to a trail just off my neighborhood, an intact forest that slopes up to a suburban abode that Americans tend to enjoy. But, I’m more interested in the grassy fields that smooth the landing of my shoes, with swarms of individual insect species flying about in that wide-open sky, seeming covered with gargantuan trees, with leaves still flying about from the branches of them. It’s noticeably darker in this shaded area of my neighborhood, with the rays of the sun now only coming through the sliver of the treetops.

            I can’t name any of the tree species, nor any of the insects gracefully waltzing around in the sky, just the frolicking rabbits and squirrels leaving and darting towards the bushes, and up various trees. I can only describe their actions, their movements, in absurdly vivid words, fully reaped with emotions as to be utterly useless to a real scientist. Then my insecurities take form once again in my mind, all jockeying up to the brim of it as if to make the loudest case for my attention, which I try to ignore, but to no avail. Even in this outside world, where the wind easily flows gracefully around my body, where the rustling of leaves sweetly plays a symphony through my ears — giving me a break from car noises, from remote clicks, from music with intense bass blaring forth from my speakers — I still can’t ignore my thoughts that accuse me of being a fake scientist, someone as too emotional to be one. In fact, it would seem that as I continue to walk on this trail, some of the grassy blades rubbing against my ankles, I feel evermore intensely — as compared to the other world of screens that endlessly blare forth knowledge that do nothing but numb me.

            I try to close my eyes, focusing on the soothing water slowly prodding by from the North Fork stream, which will eventually drain into the Bull Run watershed — I think. Opening them once more, I realize that this trail is bound to tell a story of its own — one that doesn’t seem to be completely written. Two possible scenarios run through my head: either this place will be a future sight of development, where houses would be placed upon as to appease the demand of a growing number of people coming here from Northern Virginia — I mean, part of it is already subject to development; or, this place would still stand as a remnant of a natural part of the world that seems to increasingly vanish before our eyes.

            At this point, my mind flashes back to Journey, the video game with a cryptic story that I only watched an hour before, but which is now evermore clearer in my mind, a mind that has a tendency to flutter back and forth at random intervals, even when I observe various pollinator species flap towards plant beds laid alongside the short trail. Everyday, I can’t seem to get a break from climate change, from biodiversity loss, from land use changes, and from the various ailments affecting our environment, but on this particular day, I go back toJourney also, and find out what it taught me, as well as this trail, and the natural world in general.

            I realize that old stories have the capabilities of solving modern problem — old stories like the Hero’s Journey. The Hero’s Journey is an old narrative formula used in ancient myths like the one of King Arthur, and which survived to the present day all the way to Harry Potter. It tells of an ordinary person having to achieve something greater than themselves. And, that’s what Journey shows also; in fact, when the protagonist reaches the summit of the mountain, she reaches the ultimate boon, the completion, where he’s able to receive the ultimate knowledge. And, I receive it here, in the midst of a climate crises that invades my mind at every waking moment. It appears as the final words from the soundtrack of the game:

            Na me plaignez paz (Do not pity me)

            C’est pour cela que je suis née (I was born for this)

Maybe we are born and able, even in this age, to be responsible stewards of the planet. All we have to do is perhaps change the narrative, the story that we tell behind it. And, maybe I was born for that.

Zabrina Lewis

For those who have never been to Swallow Falls State Park in Garrett County, Maryland, I highly suggest you make the trip. During my third visit to the mesmerizingly dense state park, I tried to focus sensory feelings and everything I was noticing, as well as completely disconnecting from my phone (besides the one picture I took.) This time around, I found myself worrying less about how others perceived me. I wasn’t thinking of how good I looked or if my hair had become one big afro from the humidity, I was “distracted” by the natural scenery. The park’s natural waterfalls and cavern formations really do keep your brain from thinking about your everyday thoughts. I was no longer thinking about homework assignments, familiar pressures, or my work schedule. Beyond just what was going on in my head, I was definitely more aware of my surroundings in terms of the cycles of life and how everything is connected. I found that the plopping sounds of the trickling water and the earthy smells of the soil gave me a sense of clarity merely after an hour. When I go on my weekly hikes around Northern Virginia, it is hard to find trails where you can’t hear the sounds of cars on asphalt, so it was refreshing to be technologically and physically disconnected from those anthropogenic scenes. The last thing I took note of was the fact that bringing those that I cherish to these kinds of places allows for a different type of bonding. The simple act of walking amongst the trees brought forth positive characteristics in all who were with me that day. I now realize I want to be around people who make me forget to check my phone. This park never fails to confound me.

            This weekend I also attended a Slipknot concert at Jiffy Lube Live in Gainesville, Virginia. I figured this event would be slightly different than the typical ‘sitting at home and watching T.V. kind’ of day. Everything is more intensified in regard to sounds, levels of technology, and interactions with people. Contradictory to what I experienced in my one hour of disconnection, I felt more self-conscious and self-aware during the concert, but much less aware of my surroundings. Although, I felt a part of the metal community, I became uncomfortable with myself as my phone and blasting music did not keep me from negative thoughts. This may not necessarily be a correlation with the amount of technology between the park and this concert, but is solely something I noticed within myself. Speaking again to the notion of a metal community, this concert provided a means of bringing all these like people together, yet everyone remained plug in to their phones. I witnessed several people straight up watching the concert through the video recording on their phones. My primary thought was ‘why are we spending money for a great event like this just to remain tied to our phones and not live in the moment?’ The pictures and videos we take during concerts most likely won’t last forever, however, our memories last with us until death. Using my physical senses, I could really only pay attention to the shouting crowd and ear-blasting music. In a slightly humorous way however, I constantly thought where I would see this many people drunk or on some kind of drug at the same time.

            Overall, both activities were fun for me and allowed me to be more introspective and listen to the random thoughts in my mind. The hour I spent almost entirely disconnected, was well worth it and I learned that being engaged in nature with those I love can really amplify the experience for all. I have always thought, and will continue to believe in the fact that even one hour of disconnected living a day or even a week, can greatly benefit our connection to Earth, as well as, the types of mindsets we enter and information we receive from our surroundings. The hour I spent singing along and moving to music, was also well worth it. However, I did realize the faults in having such readily accessible technology, such as a smartphone, on us all the time. This experience further strengthened the importance of disconnection in my life, as it allowed me to see the effects of technology on others around me. 

I turn on my TV and log onto Hulu- a college student’s modern day version of cable television. It still has Shark Tank playing from the night before. But before I can continue watching endless amount of hours staring at pixels on a screen an ad comes up, of course. Cable or no cable television you cant escape advertisements.  Wiz Khalifa raps to me about Oreos. A lady grabs a giant red balloon and floats towards a new Mazda because what else would a car commercial be about? Shark Tank continues. The first entrepreneur walks out and pitches. She actually has a profitable business and the invertors start their bidding war. Just when things get interesting the screen cuts to a commercial for Havertys furniture.  Cirque de Soleil performers jump around on my TV in colorful costumes doing all sorts of crazy acrobats. Shark Tank comes back on and the lady gets a deal. It’s a dream come true. I switch over to HBO to continue a show I’m watching. A list of warnings comes on the screen- nudity, violence, language, and adult content just to name a few. Immediately after there’s another warning saying viewer discretion advised. I don’t know to many things on TV without these warnings anymore. The “previously on” plays reminding me of what happened last incase I forgot, as if I haven’t just binged watched the last five episodes. I curl up in bed and get ready for another five episodes.

            About a block away from house there’s a little patch of woods that fellow neighbor set up a little city of birdhouses. It’s a good place for when I want to escape from my screen staring. So its here I find myself trying to grasp and hold onto the last moments of summer. Its evening but the sun is still up so the air is still thick and hot. One of the first things I noticed when I moved to the east coast was the humidity. Coming from a place where the heat is dry I had never quite been able to “feel” the air before. The second thing I noticed having moved in late August, which it just so happens to be now, was the cicadas. And then just like now, all I could hear was the cicadas screaming their heads off.  In fact, birdhouses and feeders surround me but all I can hear is the never-ending sound of the cicadas. It used to drive me nuts. The first month I lived in Virginia they kept me up at night cause they liked to sit in the tree outside my bedroom window.  Now however, I barely notice them unless I’m trying to. I don’t know when the change occurred but now my brain tunes them out and they just sound like summer to me. Someone once told me they loved the cicadas because they were the sound of summer. At the time I just looked at them like they were crazy because they still sounded like they were screaming as if they got blended alive. However, now I actually get it and they were right. Summer wouldn’t be quite right without them. I’m staring at two little birds rustle around in the plants on the ground when something hits my shoulder. It’s a nutshell that a squirrel dropped from the tree above me. I start paying attention to the trees and realize that every minute there’s things falling from the trees all around me. Birds aren’t the only things that can squawk. Squirrels squawk to alert of a predator and do so surprisingly loud for such a small animal. I learned this a while back when one was doing so from one of these trees. They make a lot of other similar sounds related to birds as well. I feel the mosquitos starting to bite at my ankles. I return back to my land of screens where I can still hear the cicadas from my window but safe from being the prey of mosquitoes.

            During each of these information hours I gathered a lot. I realized just how much of the same commercials I see even on a day-to-day basis.  My hour watching TV was still pretty similar to McKibbens experienced he described in terms of advertisements. While I like my electronics I do also like to take time away from them and just be outside like I was in my other hour. However at the end of both hours I was bored towards the end. For myself and I imagine many more people I need to find the balance between the two.