This morning I woke in the same place and in the same way I wake every morning; I woke 25 feet above the earth in my bed. I am covered by mass-produced, mass-marketed blankets and pillows made by the same machine in the same exact way that millions of others have been made. My bed has four dark brown glossy wooden posts with metal posts running to and from these four posts. These hold a mattress made, by machines, no differently than thousands of other twin size mattresses. I roll over, the sun has been up for hours it seems, I look over and look at my cell phone, it tells me that it’s 9:30am. I sit up; my feet are now on that same kind of glossy wood that the bed is made out of. I stretch and to my left I turn and look through the glass panes that separate me from the outside. This is my natural routine, but today this seems to be such an unnatural experience. Unnatural in an artificial way and in discord with nature. I wonder: What makes those posters so glossy, the walls so white, the time on the cell phone so accurate? I stand up, these thoughts running through my mind and start pulling on a shirt when I stop half way? Who picked the cotton for this shirt? Most likely a machine I think but then stop again. Who made it into thread, wove the thread, sewed the cloth into a “medium” sized shirt? A machine probably did most of it. If not, human tee-shirt making machines, standing in assembly lines, working in the unnatural conditions of a factory did all the other work. This isn’t quite the satisfactory answer I’d like to give myself, but I feel it’s the truth. This piece of realization makes me feel more attached to a plastic world than ever.

I grab my wallet and pull open my glossy dark brown door and enter into the outside world. I am walking to the grocery store; I notice the houses crammed next to one each other. Each one has a different shade of tope or gray painted onto venial siding meant to look like wood. Each one has its own mailbox, slab of concrete, and small square of grass. And even in suburbia, I see the animalistic tendencies in humans. Like lions, bears, and other predators, humans need their own space. If I were to intrude into a lion’s hunting ground, I’d probably have my throat ripped off. If I were to intrude into some human’s home and refuse to leave I’d probably hear some profanity along with the general message of “get off my property before I call the police.” In both scenarios an animal is defending his territory.

Closer to the store is a cluster of apartment buildings where numbers of humans live on top, bellow, and on either side of each other. I am reminded distinctly of a beehive, in which every space is utilized and each bee has his own apartment in the hive. In a flurry of frozen dinners, over packaged foods, and fluorescent lighting I am out of the grocery store, detergent in hand walking back to school. As I walk back to campus and stop to wait at the crosswalk for a sign to light up with “walk in big white letters telling me it is legal to walk across the street. Just another simple things that humans have done to make crossing the street a little less wild. Being animals embarrasses humans. This is why we make laws about where we live, about sex, etc. This is an attempt to make us feel less like animals but the animalistic behaviors in us cannot be destroyed by infrastructures, social structures, or economic structures. The more rules we have, the less we like animals. Into red square I walk and see people shaking hands or hugging in greeting and am reminded of dogs, which sniff each other’s butts to say hello.

I go to the library to record what I have just witnessed. I pause, thinking. Then, just now, as I sit here, quietly typing this essay in the library, straining my brain to remember a particular appropriate incident to use as an example, I hear the librarian’s voice call over to a student, probably a senior, who has just walked in.

“Hey, you!” she calls, “what do you think you’re doing? You need to sign in! You can’t just stroll in here like it’s a park!”

Perfect timing, just when I think I’m stuck in writing my essay another rule comes along with the purpose to make us feel less like animals. Parks are outdoors and have animals. Libraries are civilized places, with tables, books, and sign-in sheets.

Here I am again, sitting in the library, looking around to see if there’s anyone I know that I can talk to for a minor distraction from writing this essay. Like an animal, I can’t stand being isolated for two long. I, like most animals, would probably die of being lonely before hunger if I were left to live alone.

It’s hard to accept, sitting in this library, in the artificial indoors, surrounded by unnatural things, that this essay is at all important. Yes, I must write this essay, perfect the grammar, the spelling, the language to get a good grade. And with a good grade and the experience of writing an essay I’ll be able to get into a good college, and from college get a good job and then be successful, make more humans and raise them inside four comfortable man made walls. All other purposes for life besides staying alive and mating are man made. Believing in a supernatural deity dramatically makes us feel more important than animals. Humans live are literally made divinely more important. Other species’ purposes are believed to be to support ours. When it comes down to it we’re just animals. We eat, we procreate, and then we die. And so comes the end of this paper. It has been typed and printed by a machine and has never been to the outdoors. This paper isn’t all that more sophisticated, the basic principle that I am just communicating an idea stays. I am doing what all living things must do; communicate.