the new me

Things have been hectic around here, what with the finding of apartments and the search for new jobs and the preparations for moving, so it's been hard to think of things to write about. But I learned something yesterday that I thought I would share. In Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything, he writes about the human body's ability to constantly renew bits and pieces of itself. Skin dies, gets sloughed off, and is regrown. Hair falls out, and is--with the unlucky exception of those afflicted with male pattern baldness (hi, Dad), replaced. Organs repair damages, some more slowly than others, and what it all adds up to is that if you look at all of your bits and pieces and cells and tissues individually, they have all been renewing themselves at different rates to the extent that technically speaking, you are not made of altogether the same material that you were nine years ago. So during the past nine years, my body has quietly worked away at itself, and now there is nothing left of what there was of me when I was fifteen. Come to think of it, that's probably all right--fifteen was sort of a wretched age anyway--but when I was fifteen, there was nothing left of what there had been when I was six! And nine years before that, my cells didn't even exist yet! The several billion gazillion atoms that now just happen to exist in a me-shaped package had yet to coalesce. That's a really fun thing to think about. Mortality is scary, the prospect of a decline into old age is scary, and none of that is something that I want to think about, because it makes my stomach go into panic knots. But it is nice to know that you can sort of shed your material self like that, over a long period of time, and nine years later still have the same little ball of consciousness wrapped up in a (relatively) new package.

Anyway, that's enough heavy thinking. I'll end on another philosophical note from A Short History of Nearly Everything:


"Incidentally, disturbance from cosmic background radiation is something we have all experienced. Tune your television to any channel it doesn't receive, and about 1 percent of the dancing static you see is accounted for by this ancient remnant of the Big Bang. The next time you complain that there is nothing on, remember that you can always watch the birth of the universe."