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If you're paranoid, like me, and you have something that you hope lasts a long time, like your car, you want to know how to take care of it. You want to know how often you should change the oil ("whenever the red light comes on"), when you should wash and wax it ("whenever you can't tell what color it is anymore"), how often you should change your brake pads ("whenever you crash"). Fortunately, these questions have answers, because the engineers who built your car thought about these issues, and they designed your car so that it would last a good long time if you feed and water it as directed. We engineers are smart, you should do what we tell you. I wish the same were true of my body. I want to know how much dessert I can eat, how much I have to exercise, how much sex I can have, whether or not a glass of red wine every hour is good for me. I want to look in the owners manual and find out what the engineers intended, so that I can keep myself in good working order. But the reality is that the "engineer" was probably nothing more than natural selection, so all it really recommends is that I get a girl pregnant somewhere around the age of 15, and then after that it doesn't much care if I live or die. So my body's factory owners manual is kind of useless if I want to live to be a 145 year old severed head suspended in a jar of neural net interface fluid. Medical researchers seem more to have my interests in mind. It used to bother me that medicine "meddles with nature", but now I think of doctors as performance tuners, souping me up to last longer and run better than I was ever meant to. Thanks, medical research! Yes, drugs and chemicals are a perversion of the original design of your body, and using an exercise machine isn't "natural". But if the alternative is to adhere to your body's original design, then you should probably already have been eaten by tigers. All-natural, indeed. This is the kind of shit you start thinking about once you turn 30 and your body starts going downhill. See what you have to look forward to, kids? |
If you believe in intelligent design, stop reading.Yes, you would have been dead long ago and I would have been consumed by the eagles on my platform, if not already burned on my funeral pyre. Thoughtful post, BTW, and you are right. Witness the experimental body cooling of the recently paralyzed football player who is now able to walk.... Love, Aunt Bev.
Posted by: bev at October 19, 2007 06:05 AMActually, there is a owners manual built in but most of us have stopped looking into it. Being a food allergic, I shouldn't eat some stuff but I did for a long time because I didn't know that I was allergic. When a doctor finally found out that I am allergic after many years of being sick for no apparent reason and told me what I should avoid, I found that I already knew. It was all kinds of food that I loved (milk chocolate, pancakes) to eat but I always felt uneasy while eating it. I knew but I wasn't listening. Food engineers told me "that's great stuff, eat it!" but for me, it wasn't.
And the best part is that you can't possible lose the manual: It's gone when you die but then, you probably don't need it anymore.
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Posted by: tom at June 27, 2008 06:03 PM