Cultural Spelunking

I take water for granted.

It’s true. Over this faceless, highly impersonal medium of self exposition, I can bare soul and admit that. In this regard, I think I am, unfortunately, in the majority. It isn’t that I waste water by any means. No no. A born and bred Southern Californian, conservation is in my blood. Sad Diego is basically in a perpetual drought. I turn off the water when I brush my teeth. I judge my neighbors who over water their exotic, liquid leeching, non-native landscape artwork, bending laws of desert ecosystems to their will. I take speedy showers. Heck, I skip showers altogether. However, being judgmental and dirty are not the same thing as being appreciative of water.

Simply put–when I turn on a tap, I expect water to come out. It’s so logical. It is what happens 99.9% of the time. The best way of course to appreciate the miraculousness of this fact, is to have it wrenched from you at the very least convenient of times. Like, for example, this Sunday morning when I woke to get ready for Take Back the Tap, my very first event to cover for YouthNOISE, an event to which I should absolutely show up looking presentable, alert and like I had ever taken a shower. As per the plan, my cell phone alarm unceremoniously wakes me up and I drag my grimy, mid term stenched self from the cozy embrace of my twin sized dorm bed and into the bathroom. There I learned that instead of emitting my top choice in tap emissions, water (followed closely by beer), my shower would emit only other worldly gurgling noises. Dismayed, I took a moment and reflected that the possibility of this happening had not occurred to me. This is because I take the presence of clean, useable water in my life utterly for granted.

So, the moral of this ironically timed juxtaposition of events is this: let’s start making conscious efforts to appreciate the abundance of assets our delightful homeland affords us, to mobilize in support of getting everyone in the world access to clean useable water, and finally to stop leaving showers until the very last second before a major event, because clearly, you just never know.

For those of you concerned, the epilogue to the Shower Story was that the hot water had been turned off to the entire bathroom, however cold water was available in the kitchen. One sink shower and one highly amused roommate later, I made it to the fantastic Take Back the Tap event in conditions suitable for human interaction and the day was saved.