Midnight Musings

A muffin and coffee, my typical breakfast for the past month. I finally know how to make coffee at home and it is kind of inconvenient, but still a new skill.

I have been a college graduate for three months and it is nothing like I imagined it would be. There is no salvation when it comes time to repay the government for education, thus I am even poorer now than when I was in college. I am still living in the same city (which I swore would never happen) and I feel like I am living life all wrong. Ultimately, I wish to travel often, pump my gas without worrying about another full tank affecting my ability to buy groceries, and (maybe) someday I will learn to surf or fall in love, but not quite yet. I think I need to figure out patience and temperance first.

Worry about "the future" happens simultaneously with new music being released and a cute blonde bob and thrifted sweaters and cool shoes and the leaves changing colors. I have a really good job. It is flexible and I am learning a lot. Truly, I am privileged to be in the position I am in. I even have a real budget *and it really sucks* but I am going to learn.

Looming in the back of my mind is social media.

It is changing our brains and the way we process life and it is making us less social. The other day I felt like I was watching other people live their lives instead of living my own. 100s of saved DIYs that I would never make, recipes I would not prepare, photo tips for photoshoots I was not having. 30+ hours each week on social media is not sustainable. I was appalled when I realized that I was chronically online. Scrolling at every stoplight, before bed, when I woke up, with friends, in the middle of a grocery store. So, I reduced my screentime in August and then again in September. Now, I have 30 minutes on weekdays and an hour on the weekend days, 4.5 hours allotted each week. My friend made the password so I really cannot get around it.

The result?

I have been reading more. Five books since I changed the parameters. I painted a wooden salamander and wrote a bunch of letters to my friends and handmade my sister a birthday gift. I go to the park more. Finally, I have gotten around to mending my clothes and a blue quilt. BUT. I have been lonelier. I can no longer dissociate when no one is free to hang out. I can't doomscroll when I have a bad day. I feel like I am missing updates and announcements and instagram stories and tiktok trends. Ultimately, I think it is for the best, but the boredom and the quietness haunt me.

Will the sky still be blue when I turn 50? Or will it have moved into a state of perpetual smog as the mountains are mined and the people stay indoors? Will I ever succumb to the siren call of botox? Or will I fight to get wrinkly and gray and hope that I am kind enough and cool enough to stay socially relevant when I am no longer beautiful? Will I even care by then?

Lately, I have also been thinking about AI.

How it impacts critical thinking and research and the environment, how often it should be used and what it should be used for. I think about classism. Why so many struggle to pay their basic bills while others seems to bathe in tubs of money (just like Scrooge McDuck in the old cartoons). Should I play the game and make as much money as possible with the cynical hope that my children have a better future than I do? And what about the other children? Am I smart enough to reverse climate change? Do I know enough to invest in the right things? Is the world going to be a safe place for children in 5-15 years? If I have children, how can I send them to school? I wonder about death. Not my own as much, but the ever increasing odds that someone I love will be killed. It seems that every day when I read the news, there has been another shooting or murder and it hurts my heart. I think that’s all I have to say.

As always, here is a poem:

-

A dinosaur-lover’s guide to divinity

If there’s a god,

he’s probably a drunk poet

slurring stanzas into space.

Because how could someone create the blob fish sober

or a venomous mammal that lays eggs

or lizards without legs

or the tarsiers, or the pangolins

or people that play the mandolin

or Lin-Manuel Miranda.

Global warming is for people that don’t know God.

The megalodon is for the atheists,

the Caribbean is for vacation,

and higher seas means more room to swim.

This is why America is so great:

Endings are for other people.

We baptize the absurd,

smile in american flag swimsuits,

and salute a spray-tanned old new yorker.

On a springtime subway ride in New York,

a right-wing Mormon told me that Satan created the dinosaurs.

Or maybe God did, as a joke.

So, I took him to the Natural History Museum,

held his hand as I dragged him from floor to floor.

We walked the path of evolution

as I said way too much about the ankylosaur.

"Dinosaurs? God’s mission is man.”

How do you know God’s mission?

Did you meet for brunch?

What about trilobites? Or lowercase 'a' ammonites?

Don’t they tell you about divinity?

I should’ve said something.

About evolution. Science. The Big Bang.

God is both less and more than we imagine.

But with galaxies projected across t-shirts in that dark room,

I smiled.

His mind wasn’t changed,

but solid stone skeletons hung with wire

cast shadows over witches come to worship

the tragedy of endings in glass boxes.

Endings teach us about what it means to live now:

Wear sunscreen, avoid plastic, recycle.

Until it’s time to drive to work or prevent wrinkles.

Maybe we should pray.

But God won’t intervene because he is on do not disturb.

He is working on his drunken poems for the aliens.

We are his latchkey children, too scared to call for help

because angels aren’t firefighters, they are metaphors.

May “the grave yield up her dead”

so the zombie apocalypse can finally begin.

I fear the last of us won’t believe in God.

-

Yours truly,

Macy