ginny t.: Eco

When I was a kid, my most favorite thing to do on the weekends was to visit this place called the "Discovery Center." It was this awesome learning/Science Center-y place that had all kinds of hands-on learning stations set up to teach kids things like the function of the 5 senses and how bubbles are made...but the real reason I loved the Discovery Center was their "imaginary town." It was this wonderful fantasy land of reality. They had a grocery store, bank, diner, dentist office, sewer system, plane cockpit, and archeological dig, all perfectly to scale and all perfectly real. These rooms were equipped with everything you would (presumably) find at say, a bank or diner. I would spend hours running from room to room, scanning empty Nilla Wafer boxes and rubber apples at the real "working" cash register in the grocery store, giddily taking a deposit and putting it safely in the vault in the bank, and cheerily serving my imaginary customers silicone steaks and mashed potatoes. I loved this toy city. It made me feel grown up and competent and insanely important.

Now that I'm 26 and immersed in "real" reality, I no longer have the same feelings of bliss when I run my daily errands. Playing at being a "grown-up" in the Discovery Center has trained me to be a robot in my real world. I sure as Hell don't get giddy about going to the grocery store, or bank, or dentist. And there is certainly nothing jolly about the most soul-crushing job I've ever had...waitressing. The things I loved pretending to do as a child because they seemed so real have become the drudgery that makes up my adult reality. Now I go through these tasks as if on auto-pilot--a real life Audio-Animatron--imagining what it would be like to freed from the responsibilities of reality. Things happen, time passes, but it is all pretty much a blur, and I'm left wandering the isles, wondering where the drudgery of reality ends and the excitement of living begins.