Definitely. But maybe not while I'm driving.
Yeah, okay. Also I can feel where the pacemaker is with my fingers. I saw an x-ray of my chest the other day and it was crazy! It showed the inside of the pacemaker and all its wires, plus my sternum is now wired back together, so it's like wires everywhere in there. Like a robot.
That's awesome. You're basically a cyborg.
Ha!
Well, we'll all be cyborgs before long.
Yep.
---------
I did not expect my sister to agree so readily to that statement, but she is a Whovian, so I guess I underestimated her. It's getting harder to shock her lately. She's getting better at shocking me.
I'm serious about cyborgs, though. And not just in the sense that medical technology is getting better and better at performing the functions that our organs sometimes fail at, though that's part of it. It's also about technology becoming increasingly more intimate and more critical to our personal, daily lives. But that's just a part of it, too.
You know who else is serious about cyborgs? Lady Gaga. On the cover of the Born This Way album she appears as half motorcycle. In the You and I video, she appears as a cyborg again. She also appears as a mermaid. She also cross-dresses in order to play both the male and female lovers and (you know where this is going) she makes out with herself. In the Judas video she's both saint and sinner, leader and follower, prophet and heretic. In Born This Way she's both born-that-way and self-made. This is one of the critical pieces of Gaga's project: exploring, questioning and redefining the relationships between the things we consider opposites.
Humans and machines, living beings and our technical [life] support - are they opposites, or are they related? Distill the concepts down further: organic and inorganic, nature and invention - aren't they, in fact, fused? Not opposites, but opposite faces, like the faces of a coin. That's the beauty of the cyborg. And here's where the metaphor goes epic - everything has its opposite face.
Miracle/tragedy, horror/blessing, destiny/choice, wisdom/confusion, faith/doubt, success/failure, goodness/error - these things are not mutually exclusive. These things are inextricably bound. Not opposites but opposite faces. You can, perhaps, have neither, but you can never have just one - they are two aspects of a single phenomenon. Imagine if we had the words for "heads" and "tails" but no word for "coin." I think we live our lives that way.
I don't mean to say that these things are all the same - you could stretch the metaphor that far if you wanted, but why dissolve the paradox? Life is paradoxical.
I also don't mean this to say that there is an upside to every downside, some benefit arising from every hardship. Life is too senseless. I don't believe there is something good waiting to make every something-bad worth the heartache. But there is something. There's a kind of symmetry. It makes life - not happier or easier - but more beautiful.
We have miracles and tragedies, we have horrors and blessings, we have faith and doubt. There are some times it becomes hard to tell which side is which. Our lives are tossed like coins into the air. They never fall, they only spin, forever. After all, death must be just the opposite face.
So if you ask me my philosophy of life, don't be surprised if I tell you it's something like a cyborg.
