Bodies at Rest, Bodies in Motion

I woke up at two last night and I woke up again at three. These insomniac moments, I must admit, can be blamed soley on my ridiculous consumption of coffee.

I woke up at four in the morning, however, and could no longer blame that bold villain Senor Caffeine. The fault lay completely now with various voices emanating from different parts of my apartment building. Below me, the annoying, messy, loud, strange-schedule having lunatics were once again laughing at something inane. Meanwhile, In the kitchen beside my room, my roommate's guest was slurring through a phone conversation with someone and clunking around through the cabinets.

I drifted back to sleep, dreaming of spiders and clunkers and all sorts of strange things. Suddenly, my door swung open. I sprung into a sitting position, fists clenched in a Notre Dame Fighting Irish position, and screamed, "What?"

The male silhouette in my doorway stared at me, obviously confused.

"Sorry man, I was looking for the bathroom...."

The door slowly shut, the guy obviously feeling repentant.

I woke in the morning, once again blurry eyed, once again shaking cobwebs from my very being. I stumbled into the shower and stumbled out, toweled up and dripping wet.

There he was again. It was as if the guy hadn't moved since I had last seen him, two hours before. He greeted me and shook my hand, and looked at me, standing there in his boxers and shaking his head in confusion and bemusement.

"You took a shower?" he asked.
"Uh....yeah."
"Wow. Cool. I might just do the same." His tone betrayed his admiration for this obviously daring deed.

He walked into the bathroom (apparently the reason that he was up at all) and I moved to the kitchen. Still wearing my towel, I began to perform my morning rituals. I set the coffee pot on the stovetop and started to toast some bread. He came into the kitchen, obviously in the mood to talk. I, on the other hand, was all filled up with no coffee (thanks for the image to Phillip Marlowe) and felt completely the opposite about conversation.

"So you took a shower, huh?"
"Yes..."
"Wow, that's something....Taking a shower now...."
"I've got to go to work."

Suddenly, like a flash, recognition and understanding flashed across the guy's face. He understood (only now) that it was morning, that I was showering (as most people tend to do), that I needed to go to work, that I wasn't just some crazy guy that enjoyed taking showers in the middle of the night. With a few more words, he finally said goodbye and returned to my roommate's room. I continued on with my breakfast preparations and left for a short day at work.

I guess it's only fitting that with all this extra nighttime movement in my house, I should spend the afternoon learning something about the human body. (The segue is tenuous, I know...) And so, work completed, I headed off to the South Street Seaport to see "BODIES: The Exhibition."

Now, if you haven't heard of "BODIES," the exhibition basically contains a slew of "artistically" (and perhaps ethically questionably) placed "plastinated" bodies.

What is plastination? According to Wikipedia, plastination is:

"a technique used in anatomy to conserve bodies or body parts. The water and fat are replaced by certain plastics, yielding specimen that can be touched, do not smell or decay, and even retain most microscopic properties of the original sample."

So the place is filled with plastinated bodies, arranged in various and strange positions. Viewers have the chance to see corpses prepared to play all sorts of sports, conducting an orchestra, thinking hard in a Rodin fashion, and standing with arms stretched wide. Beyond these complete bodies, the glass cases in the exhibit are packed with bones and joints and tendons and eyes and nerve systems and fetuses and diseased organs and penises and ovaries and basically any conceivable part of the human body.

The experience was, quite obviously, pretty intense. Oddly enough, people seemed to feel very little disgust or fear in the presence of so many real dead bodies. On the contrary, the very realness of the bodies seemed to cause detachment in everyone there. In some, this was evidenced in the visible academic challenge of understanding the medical terminology and explanations that accompany the various "pieces" in the exhibit (I saw one guy, literally about to pull out his hair, staring at some plastinated hands, repeating "It's just so complicated" to himself out loud over and over again). In others, (me and my friend included), joking didn't seem to be a problem, and we found ourselves laughing at the funny names of certain body parts, trying to come up with new names for others, and occasionally talking about something completely separated from the bodies before us.

A few interesting things that I learned:

1. the sperm cell is the smallest in the human body, the egg is the largest.
2. brains are all folded up because brain evolution happened TOO rapidly. Basically, it seems there wasn't enough space for so much brain, so nature just stuffed it up on in there.
3. blood is red when it's filled with oxygen (hemoglobin and Oxygen reaction) and bringing it from the heart to the rest of the body. On its way back, the blood is blue.

That's it. Have a good day.