In Continuum.

I have been humbled recently, humbled by the fact that humans are so inevitably inferior to microscopic organisms. We are at the mercy of viruses and germs that surround us in every shape and form, and it doesn't take a lot for us to be down with a flu or a cold - or worse. The vulnerability of mankind has led me to realize how small we are, even after knowing the vastness of our universe through a relativity chart of planets I saw a few weeks ago. Compared to the biggest known star in the universe, our sun is not even the size of a pixel that is on our computer screen. So you can imagine how insignificant we are in the greater scheme of things, how trivial our existence really is. So we try to make up stories like the ones they preach in religions to give us a meaning, when we really are just carbon-based organisms, or the residue of a starburst a long long time ago. It makes us feel substantial, I guess, to know that we are bigger than what our bodies give us credit for. We feel superior to anything that is smaller than us, and we ignore everything that is bigger. We don't like to be smaller if we can help it, it's kinda like the race into the sky with the skyscrapers around the world. It's funny how all the skyscrapers in the world almost always look like giant concrete penises in the skylines. Oh, men - size always matters.

Then you have the little microscopic viruses that can bring us down with one single infection. We disregard it as a threat in our day to day lives because, well, our parents told us when we were young that if we can't see something, it can't hurt us. Of course, they were referring to the ghost underneath your bed and the monster hiding in the closet. All they were trying to do was to comfort you and put you to sleep so that they could get a bit of that themselves. They probably weren't thinking about germs and viruses when they told you that, which makes them forgivable for the most part. We can't see these viruses with own naked eyes, but they are all around us if we bother to read up on it. Humans are always so vulnerable to our environment, another evidence of how we are always at the mercy of mother nature. Compared to the deities proposed by many religions out there, I think mother nature has a greater power over mankind than all of them, simply because she has shown what she can do to us humans if she raised merely an eyebrow. Everything from natural disasters, to poverty, to pandemics, mother nature can squash us like ants if she wants to. But, she has been relatively kind to the lot of us, never a jealous or childish God who'd wipe away all the firstborn just because he felt like it. Anyway, humans are at the mercy of many things, even if we don't want to think of it that way.

Recently, I have been down with a strange case of flu that I am not quite sure of. My mother theorized it to be that one night when I went in and out of my air-conditioned bedroom, and the sudden increase and decrease of temperatures caused me to fall ill. I was plagued with a fever that refused to go away even under medication, and there was a period of time when it shot up to 40.6 degrees. My mother joked that she could have fried an egg on my forehead or something like that, but I wasn't amused. We made our way down to the nearest 24-hour clinic for a check up, and the culprit was found to be a fever medication called Prostan, a medication for fever. Funny how it backfired and caused me to have an even higher fever than before, simply because my body reacted negatively to it. It was horrible, that day, when holding a spoon became a chore because I was shaking so badly. Shivering in bed caused me to lose sleep and jumping out of a hot shower almost felt like I was streaking across the Arctic plains. It wasn't fun, but I lived through everything to be typing about it here. I haven't been a healthy kid throughout my life, something almost always happen on a year to year basis that I really should take note of the symptoms. Anyway, I still have packets of medication on my table right now, and I am sure I could start a sort of pharmacy with whatever that I have at hand.

My point is that it is so easy for humans to fall sick and die, you know. With the swine flu on the loose right now, it really drives the point home that if we do not die from a giant space meteor hitting our planet, we are going to be wiped out by little viruses in our bodies. Everything is a threat to us, and somehow we invite them into our houses all the time. We had the mad cow disease a few years ago, the bird flu, and now we have the swine flu. It just seems that the viruses are taking terms to infect different animals to just to kill us all. We have survived most of those so far, but I am pretty sure that it will mutate itself and come back with a bang in the future. Perhaps it'd infect our house pets next, like little puppies or little hamsters. Pet lovers would probably dump their pets out in the streets when the time comes, which would be a sad sight indeed. Anyway, we live in a world right now where the things we eat could kill us, the people we meet could kill us, the air we breathe could kill us, the water we drink could kill us. It doesn't take a lot to wipe out mankind really, because we are just such vulnerable creatures. I always think about such things, how easy it would be for somebody to kill large amount of people if he so wishes. If you really want to wipe out the species, all you need to do is to have a lot of money and a little patience. Then, allow nature to do its work - mission accomplished.

We have our missiles and our tanks, we have our bombs and our mines, and this illusion of defense makes us feel safe, you know. Like an imaginary fortress around you to make you feel like you are being well-protected. The truth is, though, even if you somehow manage to surround your entire national border with military defenses, you can never fully prevent viruses to slip through if they want to. When that happens, humans are going to fall sick, they are going to die. No one is going to be able to operate all the missiles and all the guns, so all those things become practically useless. Just imagine that, a whole population of people who cannot press buttons to launch missiles and no one to stand in command. That'd be a pretty easy country to invade if you want to, because humans are just so vulnerable. Think War of the Worlds and how the aliens died not because of the technology that humans used in an attempt to defeat them, but microscopic organisms that they are apparently allergic to, or something. That can be said about mankind as well, because we go on with our lives no caring too much about these things until something major happens somewhere on another side of the world. This time, it took 152 Mexicans for the rest of the world to know that this is a big deal.

Let's compare ourselves to our animal counterparts. We have our brains and we have our smarts. Humans have been creating music, poetry, making machines and sending people onto the moon. Those are great feats indeed, but there are some basic animal abilities that we definitely cannot match up to. Have you watched those documentaries on television of animals living in extreme temperatures. You know, like some species of fox, polar bears, penguins and such? You throw a human into that kind of condition and they are probably going to die within a few hours, no doubt. The hair on our body has little to no functions at all, if you think about it. Armpit hairs serve no purpose, eyebrows serve no purpose, leg hairs serve no purpose, and the patches of hair in front of our knuckles certainly serves no purpose at all. We can't live in the extreme cold and we can't really live in the extreme heat. But you see animals living happily under those circumstances, adapting and readapting if they need to. Humans die from everything - everything. It just sucks that despite all the technological advancements, a little flu virus could still kill you.

Sometimes, it is better to not recognize the threats though. Like, reading statistics about how your computer keyboard is dirtier than your toilet bowl is one of those things that you'd rather not know. But of course, if you have reached this sentence in this paragraph without skipping a word, you've known that by now - so sorry about that. But it is the truth, and you cannot deny that. The bed we sleep in, the detergents we use in the bathrooms, our keyboards, the kitchen, something we cannot see can kill us. It's so frustrating sometimes, to feel how useless you are in preventing such things from happening. Even if you have a healthy diet, exercise a lot, and do all those things that health magazines tell you to do to live a healthy life, you are still going to fall ill and probably not live past ninety years old. There are rarities of course, but people still die at the very end anyway. We die because of the things we eat, and they accumulate over the years to kill us. We are poisoning ourselves with every meal, and we are killing ourselves if we don't eat. It is a dilemma, but eating seems to be the better option. Easier to leave with a full stomach, you know.

I guess what I am trying to say is that human ignorance can sometimes reach a point that disgusts me. You know, there are times when we feel like we are invulnerable to the many elements thrown at us. We have built bridges over caverns and dams to stop rivers. We have built drills to drill deep into the seabed to abstract oil, and we have conquered the highest mountains. It gives us a strange sense of superiority I guess, it makes us feel like we are better than everybody else. Even if you don't consciously think about it every time, you probably think about it sometimes. But right now, as I am typing this entry, I suddenly feel very humbled by all the illnesses that I have been through throughout my life. They are like little post-it reminders for me, telling me that you are big, but not that big. You can accomplish a great many things, but remember to take care of yourself whenever you are, wherever you are. It's funny how thoughts like that can be spawned by having a high fever in the middle of the night. But I guess, even such an experience could mean a whole lot more than a bad start to a holiday.