Wednesday, April 9, 2008

Existential Musings

Speeding down a slope on a bicycle, knowing that if you exert any more force than a feather's touch on the brake levers you'd fly over the bars. Now that's surreal.

We put our lives in precarious situations all the time, but we turn out all right, don't we? Zooming from country to country in a pressurised metal tube 11km in the sky, where the air is too thin and too cold to breathe. And going up and down buildings in steel cages held tens of storeys above the ground just by a few taut cables. And putting ourselves at the mercy of the surgeons that cut our abdomens open and the anaesthetists who paralyse our breathing muscles and make us entirely dependent on a creaky machine for oxygen.

Yet, surprisingly few people die in these seemingly-absurd situations. Yay for technology.

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I got wet this evening on my bike ride. About time anyway, before that, I had not rode in the rain for a long, long time. The feeling of high velocity rain bullets stinging my skin is almost unfamiliar.

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Last night I dreamt that I was hospitalised for leukemia. Some survive and some don't. And I was so helpless in the hospital bed, not knowing what kind of leukemia I had and the chances of survival. And the intravenous cannula in my hand irritated me to no end. They did a fingerprick on me for my blood and my finger hurt. Fear - while not knowing what exactly to be afraid of - it's a horrible feeling.

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The new posting's going great. No news is good news!

2 comments:

Pkchukiss said...

Now, your 2nd paragraph is really surreal :)

by Vincent McSquishee said...

There's nothing absurd about not dying, especially when you're on the bicycle.

And then give forensic pathology some thought, and you realise ...

It takes a lot of work to actually *die*.

Hooray for engineering and physics, and for lessons about the all-too-human ability to deny, deny, deny.