Gimme some fish food

After a particularly sweaty bike ride to school this morning, I walked into a Tulane classroom where I am taking a course (ironically enough) on Religions of Native North America. As we have come to be able to expect, the classroom was far lower in temperature than the air outside. While at first I was relieved to cool after a hot ride, my perspiration soon turned into a clamminess and I was forced to bundle up in a sweater. I noticed on the wall next to me a little sign that said "CLIMATE CONTROLLED CLASSROOM, PLEASE DO NOT OPEN WINDOWS." I instantly felt slightly trapped and was reminded as I am again and again how much we live in a society obsessed with condition control. The indoors have become our fortresses against the "outside" world which we strive to defend: no insects may infiltrate our territory--for this is automatically perceived as a personal threat (all spiders aim to strike, all wasps to sting), facilities must be sanitary and the atmosphere inside must give no hint to the natural season occurring when you step out the door. Not only do we draw the line between ourselves and our co-inhabitant creatures adamantly, but we subject our bodies to extreme changes in temperature to which they must constantly re-adapt. It makes me wonder not only how this way of living affects our health (and I suspect a connection to the beginning-of-the-year common cold epidemics among students to overly-A/Cd classrooms), but the toll of such sterility on the soul.

Humans are very peculiar animals. I find it strange and perhaps evolutionarily faulty that we have developed to be this species (or really a sub-set of a species if we are only really talking about "first-world" humans here) who has constructed an infrastructure and way of life that makes it possible to spend only the mere minutes a day actually exposed to the atmosphere: between one door and another (from your home to car to building to car to grocery store to home) . Most of us no longer possess the sacred knowledge passed on for thousands of years of making a fire. The torch has been dropped. On the time line of human history we have adapted to existence in such a way that we can no longer adapt to the world which we have not created ourselves. We built walls and our windows are now screwed shut. We can only look through the glass of human civilization to the rest of the world. We are the sickly spectacle. We are the ones in the aquarium being gawked at.