journal features

working at the speed of my daughter

the journal of Michael Werneburg

twenty-eight years and a million words

Kokubunji, 2023.10.21

I discovered a one-liter thing of milk sitting on the counter. I asked my daughter if it was there because it was bad. Yes. So I took it from its perch next to the sink and poured it. Then I rinsed and cut up the cartons and did the dishes while she hung some small items on a laundry rack. It took nearly twenty minutes to wrap up the dishes at which time I found she'd hung all of eleven socks and other items. So, nearly two minutes per item.

Ah, to be a child.

rand()m quote

I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time — when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness... The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance.

—Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World (1995)