Monday, April 25, 2005
Noticing the lack of noticing
Evan Eilers
ENGL 10l J
Professor Bierma
Journal entry
Noticing the lack of noticing
April 4, 2005
Have you ever noticed how much you don’t notice? Take the information at the top of the page for example. I replaced the last 1 in 101 with a lower case L and I’d bet my favorite kidney that almost nobody who reads this journal would notice it if I hadn’t pointed it out. The fact of the matter is that people tend to ignore most of the world unless it jumps out of a shrubbery and tries to eat them.
Mild mannered citizens will go about their daily routines blissfully unaware that they have life threatening diseases living in their throats being repressed and bullied around by their tyrannical immune system. They don’t notice the small Peruvian Money-growing Trees next to their houses until they get cut down and shipped off to the U.S. Mint for slave labor. They will drive across a town before they realize that all of the signs have been switched and that the city hall has been appropriately renamed “city landfill”. People won’t notice the red light that they just drove through five blocks away or the group of police tailing them with their sirens blaring and lights flashing.
At times, I think it’s a good thing that we don’t notice half of the things around us. If we did, we would all end up being afraid of touching anything that might have germs on it or our brains would overload and our neurons would fry like bacon.