| bring him home |
[Feb. 1st, 2008|10:10 am] |
Press Release: Cat Le-Huy has been detained in a Dubai prison on false drug charges.
Mildred Von reports, "He's in very good spirits, being in the company other dozens of others in his situation at the prison. He told me that many of his new friends have been there awaiting charges for months...one guy in particular, who has been there ten months, just had his seventeenth birthday. The problem is, he tells me, they just make up the rules as they go along. There is no procedure to follow, and this is why so many are just sitting in purgatory without so much as knowing what they're charged with. They lose their jobs, their homes, their lives."
His friends are asking for signatures on a petition to free him, so please spread the word.
Petition is here
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| sufficiently advanced biology |
[Feb. 1st, 2008|11:14 am] |
Every now and then, I'm overcome with amazement that my body even works. The human body is an insanely complex system, with so many possible ways to break down, so many bad things that could happen to it. And yet we go on waking up each morning, and doing all this cool stuff. Thanks to two little balls of jelly sitting miraculously unsquished in my head, I can see the world around me, and my brain transforms that information into meaning. I form thoughts, and my fingers type words onto this keyboard, and I don't even really know how; I just do it. If I decide to go downstairs, my nerves and muscles and bones will perform the gazillions of interconnected actions that take me there. I can make jokes and love and sing. I can jump and spin around, and if I fall down in the snow I can stand back up and keep moving and drink some hot cocoa and get warm again. I go on breathing, breathing, breathing all the time. The heart goes on pumping. The body renews itself.
That's the part that really gets me: the body renews itself. Continually, over and over. Sure, the process sometimes goes wrong, but what's more astonishing is how often the body gets it right. Blood cells die off at a furious rate while the body creates new blood to replace them. We shed 50,000 flakes of dead skin every minute and underneath it is new skin. Isn't that weird? The new shell looks just like the old shell. But it's never been touched by the things and people that touched us a year ago, a week ago. We're walking around wearing brand-new replicated skins, filled with fresh blood. Like we've been replaced by pod people while we sleep, but inside the alien is us.
Various cultures place the soul of a person in the heart, which is a sturdy vessel for it, since that organ remains intact even while so much around it changes. If heart tissue is damaged, it scars over but doesn't replace itself: the heart you get is the heart you keep. People talk about the body aging while the heart stays young, but that's kind of a soppy metaphor; it seems to me that my heart is the enduring veteran in this body. It's the same chunk of muscle that's been with me all along, through everywhere I've been, everything I've done, everything that's happened to me. I think of it as the part that's the most truly myself. Everything else is transitory.
Stuff you think about as a birthday's approaching and you're starting to get closer to the big numbers, I guess. |
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