Mars

A friend of mine from Berlin posted the link to this picture earlier, assuring me that Facebook is still a good resource for all space-related news. It's NASA's photograph of a sunset on Mars.

I read The Martian Chronicles during elementary school and they've stuck with me since. Ray Bradbury had the talent of being both sparse and provocative, and although I doubt Martians are waiting for us with gold clouds and weapons I could see rocket summers in America and New New York on Mars. Wouldn't you want to live in New New York? Sounds kind of like a Pokémon.

Life in 2015 is exhausting. In high school your guidance counselors snap their fingers at you to go, go, go do everything for college, and there's no rest zone in between seven classes and National Honor Society and five more afterschool clubs. I have a problem with overstimulation: everything shuts down, blue screen of death, if there's too much noise, too much light. I was overstimulated every day, and every day I would come home and lay down in my room with the lights off for hours before I could even think about doing anything else. I would sleep only three or four hours a night. When I went to Wellesley I actually had to train myself to feel okay about sleeping a full eight or nine hours.

Talk about crazy.

Institutions are like back roads and alleyways. You make your way through one only to turn the corner and make your way through another, and another. People have been going on about the system for ages. I don't mean to wallow there.

But I do want to talk about how trapped I feel in a world where every piece of land is mapped, named and owned. In the Middle Ages you could just strike out on your own with a group of friends and family. Start a new community, a totally new community, owned only by you and yours.

We can't do that anymore. Our policemen shoot unarmed kids in the streets and our politicians talk about drawing up nationl registries of the mentally ill.

The situation is complex and some institutions are necessary and helpful, sure, but it still feels like entrapment. Like I'm looking at a future full of red tape, paperwork, and controlled resources. Life is expensive. Healthcare is expensive. It's all enough to suck the spirit out of everyone.

It makes moving to Mars sound like freedom.

#Mars