Losing things and Consumerism

Perhaps, the people that know me well know that I tend to lose things, even though I have them right under my nose. Mostly small things such as pens and pencils. When I lose them, however, I feel as if my whole world has been overturned and that I've made such a grave error. Those mistakes seem to happen more frequently than I thought possible. And I'm getting tired of it. Last Thursday, I lost my key for the middle school. I retraced my steps as much as possible, cleared off my dresser, looked on and under furniture, basically overturned my whole room. I checked my cubby at school, thinking that perhaps it was there. Vanished. It's awful, because I think I have everything and then I leave the key some place, go take a nap, and forget where in creation I put the darn thing. And as I've mentioned before, my memory tends to be fuzzy, even short term memory. So I feel lost in that sense, hoping that I will be able to recover the key that somehow slipped by without my realization. It's incredibly frustrating. And I wish I had photographic memory or at least, a better memory that could pen-point exactly where I put things and when. It seems it should be just as easy as putting things back in the same place every time, but it seems that I sometimes don't think and end up forgetting my placement of things. I wish I could be more conscious of where I put things, so that things would never get lost. Such is my hope and perhaps a New Year's Resolution to remember where I put things so that I won't lose things as often. Sometimes I feel the problem is having too much stuff and not knowing where to put everything... having less seems as if it would eradicate many of these complicated problems.

This week, I'm talking to my students about consumerism, an appropriate topic for the Christmas holidays. The students seem to think that we are overusing our resources as we spend and spend and that we would do much better to conserve rather than consume. Interesting insights from the terminale students. In a world, where buying the latest... has become the norm, it seems that we are overrunning our resources to the point of scarcity. Greed seems to be on most people's minds and less satisfaction with anything they currently have. People are unhappy because society creates their "needs." The media controls how we think and act. It's a scary thing to think we are so much influenced by the media. Yet, it's an undeniable reality. I'm looking forward to hearing the opinions from the other classes this week.