catfish

i run on water and thought, but only as it consumes me and not because i am human.

an overwhelming subpopulous of humanity pursues thought as if it were food. not as if it were a delicacy, and not in the way we sought after food when food was/is scarce, but in the same greedy insatiable way that is characteristic of fast food nations... dare i say "brain obesity"... actually no... i'm not going to go there... because then i'd have to talk about omega six and placental malleability and the origins of intelligence and i don't have it in me at the moment. but. why are we so hungry for thought? and not just thought for the sake of wonder; we have conglomerated on this idea that thought is worthless if it doesn't lead to concrete ends. answers. explanations. and this... is extremism. and this... is what intraspecies competition has come to (and you... can think about that one because i'm not going to follow it up just now).

i do not fit in well in the world of medicine for two reasons: patients, and the government.

patients - unless they are of the mindset that i am about to indulge - expect medicine to perform miracles. to be god in a 400 mg tablet of compressed powder. the thing is that medicine doesn't work that way... because your body's biochemistry doesn't work that way. nobody has the same performance of metabolism, digestion or cellular transduction mechanisms. ergo, exogenous chemicals do not affect everyone in the same way (to the same end that diets don't work the same way for everyone and people give up on them because their body didn't respond optimally, which is why being conscious of your active health is the better alternative). for the most part, we're built to perform the same biological functions and a high enough concentration of a drug will do similar things in us all: alleviate the system malfunction it was designed to target. however. because we are not built like appliances, we respond differently. tylenol works for the most part with innocuous residue because its target is so well understood, and happens to be fairly well behaviorally conserved across humans. most biochemical mechanisms are not so simple. yes, there are myriad side effects for every drug. that is because almost any patient who takes that drug will have at least one of those side effects. almost nobody will have all of them, because your reaction depends on the particular idiosyncrasies of your system. to bring about a point, i do not fit in well in the world of medicine because patients do not understand or accept this, and i am totally okay with it. because i understand that if you're going to endogenously assault the body, you had better damn well cater to the specific nature of that body in the best way you can. or, if you're going to take a drug that's on the market but not quite yet understood in its entirety, you had better damn well not expect it to work perfectly in your very particular system. because i think that there is no single answer to any question, and that more often than not the answers end up making the questions more mysterious and any concrete answer more elusive (for the same reason, i could never be a politician, lawyer or historian). point: if we did not so vehemently lust after thought as a provider of perfect answers, we would not have unfathomable expectations of medicine, would not be so disappointed, would not lose confidence in science, and i would fit perfectly in the world of medicine.

the government - on whom i will not get started because the rant is unending - protects the patient, and is not only unyielding to the nature of medicine as a science, but is the propago mater that defines the patient's expectations of medicine... fucking conservative tyrannical government... screwing up what i want to do with my life...

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i really don't think this is scheherazade's fault. yes, intelligence is attractive, and helps propagate the species and all that junk (not that we're prized machines to be replicated anymore, but that's another problem). but really, intrigue is always in the invigorating mystery, and being able to speculate without needing to arrive at an end, but enough to shape our tendancies... that should be what our species runs on. r o m a n t i c p r a g m a t i s m.

and so i am a catfish. benthic, beneath the chaos created by the noise of humanity's greedy hunger for this particular kind of knowledge. detritivorous, feeding on the development of thoughts that people discard because they are unrefined and inconclusive. and running on water. i could carry this one even further and say that like the male catfish, i house and nurture eggs of thought with my mouth until they are ready to hatch... but i'm not going to...


really? with the metaphor and the disgusting cliche? yes, yes i did.