The Man Who Ate Everything

The short story is my new best friend. At a phase in my life when I lack the time (or perhaps motivation) to even shave my legs, the last thing I want to do is to throw myself into a chapter of a complex novel. So I read short stories.

The book that I am reading right now is awesome: it's a collection of vignettes from a former food critic for Vogue. I love books about food, especially when they explore it in different cultural and scientific contexts (as Pollan does in The Botany of Desire). An excerpt from the story titled "Ripeness is All":

"Eternal vigilance is the price of ripeness. Make it a habit to return unripe fruit. Throw a scene if need be. Your message may reach the wholesaler or the grower. For the smallest fruit, here's a handy tip: When nobody is looking, remove a berry from its little basket and conceal it in your palm. With your other hand, quickly wheel your shopping cart into a dark corner of, say, the cheese department and pop the berry into your mouth. Chew. Appraise its texture, sweetness, aromatic flavor compounds, and seediness. Then decide whether to invest in an entire basket. But first buy some cheese. You can never have enough good ripe cheese."

Cannot wait to indulge in some home-cooked meals in T-4 days!

Happy Holidays to you all

Cavarium, meninges, and brain.

I had the honor of dissecting our cadaver, T.S.'s brain today. The skull had been cut two centimeters up from the orbital fossa and occipital protruberance, and once it was chiseled away and the dura was severed, I was able to hold T.S.'s entire past life in my hands. His most fond memories, his hopes and fears, everything that made him the person he was, was contained in that epiphenomenon, his brain.

No one describes as well, in my opinion, the insanity of how organic matter such as a brain becomes a person's consciousness and projection onto others, as Hofstadter does in A Strange Loop. As I was dissecting, I was learning the anatomy and the physiology but also completely baffled by how they once came together to first sustain life, then spark consciousness, then create an identity that could change and evolve, and finally cross and intermingle with other minds. Just like how a ripple starts out as a drop of water.

These moments in my studies really humble me, when I realize how we will never be able to come close to understanding something so elegantly complex that just happens, without our knowledge or action, effortlessly and naturally.