Tin Owl Cheer

Psychological Insights as Exposed by Introductory Biology

All this silence makes me self-conscious. Exorcized from my typical world of hustle and bustle, constant stimulation and communication, I find myself acutely aware of such things as my eyelashes. Perhaps my nerves are grasping for their normal level of stimulation. The typical, joyous sensory overload that seems to simultaneously so uniformly characterize and punctuate my life seems to have eked up my neurological threshold and my synapses are crying out in protest of this sudden inertia. “Where are they?” they demand. “The constant white noise punctuated by the occasional sigh of the exasperated student? The tangible buzz of excitement at 9:55 when an entire community glances at their clock and realizes that they are within minutes of an institutional reminder that they are loved and cared for?” “Where,” they demand, “is that gaggle of giggling mirth that travels as an effervescent force field, always circling you, you circling them, linking fingers, limbs like elephants marching trunk to tail?”  And so, in search of stimulation, my nerves extend their ganglia like thousands of searching fingers and rest upon such things as the weight of each of my tiny arm-hairs as they retreat to gravity and touch my skin, never quite delicately enough. Suddenly, the fact that I am a human, a poignantly mortal biological machine constructed primarily of plasma, ever-wrapped in this strangely pliable and constantly renewing sac sometimes called an epidermis. Such a conceptually strange and yet extraordinarily ordinary juxtaposition of the ephemeral and the temporarily immortal. This transience of permanence is something so entirely unique to stem cells. There. Something I learned from the painfully involved volumes of  introductory biology.