semester two of Medical Science at university, and I am getting bored. It isn’t the content of my course but the content of my character. It feels as though I am slowly being diluted out of the bold and bright genres of people and into the masses. I’ve realised that impressing upon and provoking others is the only way to keep my – and pardon the non-scientific metaphor – spirit alive.
This has been achieved in many forms:
– Dying my hair an unapologetic shade of pink.
– Omitting from memory that bras should be worn every time you wear a white t-shirt. – Wearing a t-shirt with the word “sex” written on it in at least 72 pt font size.
– Wearing Miu Miu cat-eye sunglasses indoors and inside my classrooms at all times.
Superficiality seems to be the only way to maintain a reality where my mind is still inside my cerebrum, which is inside my skull, which is adorned by a Jacquemus hat.
What I have learnt through studying medical science is that we are made up of oxygen, carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, calcium, and phosphorus, potassium, sulfur, sodium, chlorine, and magnesium and under no circumstances anything more. There’s nothing inherently special about YOU. There’s nothing spiritual about science because there is no such thing as a soul, and there’s nothing sinister about existing because it is completely biological.
To obtain another “element” so to speak, that makes us who we are, we try to generate a superficial footprint. I wonder what the scientists of the future will say when they analyse my fossilised carbon footprint, except it will have a pointed-toe imprint with a cylindrical J.W Anderson-heel.
Materialist provocation isn’t bad if it gives you a code with which to live by and identify with. In a way, fashion and expressionism keep us grounded. When you have an anatomy lab and you hold a real human heart in your daintily manicured hands, you realise that everything physical is quantifiable, but that impressions you make on other people and developed experiences are not, but that they exist concurrently in the same world and in the same lifetime. And in a twisted form of logic, that means that imaginary or conceptual things transcend their one-dimensional nature and transpose into the 3D real world.
