God is Kim Jung Il

God is Kim Jung Il

I’ve spent the better part of this week engrossed in Pulitzer Prize winning audiobook, “the Orphan Master’s Son,” which chronicles the life of character Jun Do and his various exploits - kidnapping Japanese citizens, gathering radio intelligence, being bitten by sharks - as a citizen in the unfathomable clutches of the North Korean government.

The story is extraordinary - almost unfathomably so. As a young child, Jun Do’s mother is forcibly transported to the capital - the fate of all women and girls of marginal beauty. Wives are, for the most part, assigned to their husbands as tokens of reward. Doctors are functionally nonexistent, and starvation and disease are pervasive. Electricity is spotty and cuts out at nine pm. Curfew is mandatory. Anti government sentiments or attempts at escape are punishable by forced labour (and likely death) for both the perpetrator and the entirety of their family as well as any neighbours or coworkers suspected to be complacent. Government control is total and beyond the petty incursions of logic or consistency.

Earlier this week, about half way through the book and in desperate need of reassurance, I turned to a friend and expressed my doubts: perhaps the author, American Adam Johnson, had crafted a grotesque fantasy built upon our suspicions and lack of knowledge of the reclusive nation (the most isolated in the world)? Perhaps the government described were naught but the paranoid imagining of someone who’d consumed too much George Orwell. I knew only of the country’s frequent military aggressions, alongside vaguely recalled news stories of drought and poverty and difficulties with accepting aid from foreign nations. These facts did not paint an especially tender image of a land of freedom and plenty, but they certainly did not lead me to predict...this. Surely things can’t be that bad in North Korea.

With these famous last words I finished by book, a work of fiction, and set about gathering some facts.

The facts were far more disturbing than anything imagined by Orwell or Johnson. In a New York Times’ review of the book (which criticized the author’s light treatment of such a serious subject matter) the reviewer mentions, without qualification, that North Korea is the worst place on Earth. While I’m interesting in seeing the data backing up that statement (for no reason other than morbid curiousity: what other locations vied for the title? Were only entire nations considered, or also isolated geographic entities - like ice flows or volcanoes? What criteria held the most weight? In what form would the data be presented - perhaps a circle graph?), I’m inclined to agree with him. 

North Korea is batshit crazy.

In attempting to create a more cogent picture of the “Most Democratic Nation in the World,” ruled by a hereditary line of all-powerful dictators, I’m finding the task impossible - because it’s a world of inherent contradictions and terrifying (unreality?).

Rare foreign visitors, allowed on short and escorted trips to pre-approved destinations, appear stunned at both the abject poverty of the nation’s people and their unfailing devotion to the Dear Leader, whose portrait is hung in every room. A woman has surgery by a visiting foreign doctor, restoring her vision, and upon removal of her bandages she goes straight to the room’s portrait and loudly proclaims her humble thanks to the benevolence of the Great Leader, vowing to work all the harder in the salt mines. She cries with the heartfelt sincerity of her gratitude while the other occupants of the room erupt in fervent applause.

All interviews with North Korean citizens go something like this:

Question: [Absolutely anything]

Answer: By the grace and mercy of our Great Leader, whose loving benevolence ensures the prosperity of our great nation, so that I may better serve him.

Typically, the interview ends soon afterwards.

The sheer intensity of this reverence is suspicious - in no small part because it’s common knowledge that any minor misstep or perceived slight is likely to lead to death, torture, or a lifetime of hard labour in an internment camp, both for the guilty party and anyone they love. Some prison camps are strictly for the internment of family members of dissidents and defectors.

And yet, disturbingly, these spontaneous proclamations seem...sincere.

And then I thought of God - that mysterious all-loving, all-knowing magic man who comforts those who've passed on and allows all good things to happen to those who praise Him. Suddenly the fervent exclamations of the North Koreans started to sound a bit more familiar.

Good Christians know that all good things in life are by the grace of God. Grammy awards and football games are won because God wills it to be so. Wars are won in His name. And yet we are taught to fear Him and His mighty jealousy - because He’s also kind of a Jerk and very happy to send you to fire and brimstone for all of eternity because you made the mistake of being born in the wrong country or being attracted to the wrong sex or, worst of all, questioning the justice of His practices.

So, I have to give North Korea a little credit, because at least Kim Jung Il exists...

I Love You

Her mother regularly told her daughter she loved her. The words were not warm and brimming with sentiment, but rather cold and austere, as much of her mother’s communication tended to be. In the phrase, too, lay a hint of anger and defensiveness, as in I’m not like those crappy parents who never tell their children they are loved, or try to accuse me now that your childhood is bad when I have said, on record, that I love you, every day for the last ten years.

Her father, too, emphatically expressed his love for his children at the end of every conversation, stated both as a fact and a departing signature, substituting for ‘be good to your mother,’ which was awkward, or ‘see ya later, alligator,’ which the children had quickly outgrown. She understood her fathers actions better because, as an irregular parental figure, he may be days or weeks out of their lives, and she felt he sincerely wanted to leave his children with a concrete assurance of his feelings for them, lest they doubt it in his absence.

The frequency of “I love you”s was so pronounced in both parents that she eventually grew to suspect that they had conversed on the subject at least once, during that unknowable time period when they had been a couple and assumedly had conversations. Like most parenting decisions made at the time, she suspected it was a reaction to something that had occurred in one or both of their childhoods, or, at the very least, in the childhood of someone they both knew or a fictional character whose childhood was used as a parable in the church they attended, whereby both mother and father to-be learned the terrible damage that could be wrought by not telling your child, often enough, that they were loved.

They had decided or been taught that the best way to convey their unconditional love was to repeat the phrase “I love you,” eagerly, regularly, at socially acceptable intervals, such as when the child is departing for school, or at the end of a phone conversation, and she suspected that the habit of this action had eventually overshadowed the underlying intention of the act, leaving her mother’s disregard for conveying love or ensuring the feeling of love in her children, and left only the oft repeated phrase.

Like most of the values that her parents fervently persisted in, she suspected this stemmed from a cultural fad that had existed in the mid to late seventies, or general movement of social consciousness which had developed at that time and since evolved considerably so as to be unrecognizable in its present form. Like being a born-again Christian**, and the Muppet Show.

As in all things parental, the line between love, resentment, and socially-accepted obligation was blurry at best.

The mother cares for her children because she loves them. The mother cares for her children because she’s legally obligated to do so and would be judged by others if she does not. The mother cares for her children because she expects said children to acknowledge her care as a sacrifice made due to love and to never imply that such sacrifice is due to legal obligation or societal pressure, lest they be screamed at in high pitched tones, which they are to understand stems from an intense abundance of love, but also hurt and anger and dislike, because all such emotions freely coexist, as in “I love you, but I don’t like you,” a phrase which was frequently heard in her early childhood.

The daughter views “like” as the lesser version of “love,” thus negating her mothers views on the subject entirely. The daughter grows defensive of this connectedness, holding it central to her world view, becoming incensed and eventually tearful if anyone argues that the terms are not directly linked. She takes care to assure her loved ones, specifically her two dogs and sister, and her mother to a much lesser degree, that she both likes them and loves them, and she does so at intervals which are not predetermined and thus vary in frequency but still often include the ends of phone calls and times of departure.

**Christian, in this case, meaning ‘evangelical,’ just like Jimmy Carter’s sister who, if I remember it correctly, was reported as going around and performing freelance exorcisms. The fact that members of this evangelical  branch of protestantism refer to themselves just “Christians,” as though there were only one real kind, is usually enough to characterize them, at least as far as I was concerned.

David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King

posthumously published audiobook* version

(*so the spelling and/or punctuation is my own and therefore may be wonky)

School Dress Codes are So Sexist

I’ve been on a feminist kick lately - not the act of kicking feminists, though that is a popular activity among some circles, I’m sure - but the looking at everything and everyone and proclaiming with disgust “that is SO sexist!” and then looking to other people, mostly women, and demanding that they emphatically agree. (The act of looking primarily to women to validate sexism is, in fact, so sexist.)

This started when I was reading through the classics: the Iliad and Odyssey, specifically. It didn’t help that these stories were age-old tales of rapture and pillage, that most of the female characters were war booty, and that women, at the time of the writing of said tales, weren’t seen so much as people as prized possessions with added sentimental value - a bit like a particularly loyal and well-bred battle horse. Or a favourite ram. Homer? Sexist. Trojans? Sexist. Greeks, and their gods? So sexist.

The whole world, in fact - sexist! - so much so that the Wikipedia timeline for women’s rights (which isn’t about “equality” so much as “the giving of rights to women”) doesn’t start until 1718 AD.

But even that was, arguably, a long time ago. Temporarily running low on fury, I looked to modern times and my own life in an attempt to prolong my rage.

I asked my mother, a teacher, to read to me the dress code of her high school. She wasn’t able to remember it, offhand, and couldn’t be bothered to dig it out. I fumed. I wanted references to skirt length and tank tops - items who’s name implied gender. Actually, I wanted reference to gender directly - and, depending on the age of the text and its author, I might find it. And even if I found no evidence of such language in the dress code, I felt secure in my knowledge that the high school dress code is one of the more obvious examples of good-old-fashioned misogyny in action: namely, the covering up of women so as not to unduly tempt the men. (Undeterred by my mother, who was lazy and quite possibly sexist, a short google search confirmed my suspicions.)

Sure, there might be an entire sentence or paragraph on the prohibition of gang insignia, and a dress code might readily proclaim its ultimate desire to promote the “neat and tidy” appearance of students, but in my experience this code was enforced with one goal in mind - getting girls to hide their bodies.

Stained, torn, and worn-out clothing were all prohibited by my high school’s dress code - but I never saw anyone asked to cover up a ripped or grass-stained knee. All items specifically prohibited - spaghetti straps and shorts less than one half the length of a student’s thigh - were aimed at women’s fashion.

Administrators argued that boys, too, could theoretically be affected by such prohibitions, should they come to school in short shorts or spaghetti straps (which of course could not reasonably happen as no retailer within fifty miles of Tilbury, Ontario, housed any such clothing in men's sizes). But that argument falls apart when you note that male sports teams and gym classes often allowed students to go entirely shirtless, and that a popular school comedy sketch involved our male French teacher wearing a sequined, strapless dress. It’s an obvious double standard.

Sure, I understand school systems wanting at least a semblance of decorum, of respectability. And I understand everyone’s feeling of being very, very uncomfortable upon first witnessing a fourteen year old’s thong and/or ass crack. It seems logical to want to make rules against such things. But in making and enforcing those rules, teachers and administrators inevitably end up targeting girl’s clothing and wanting women to “cover up” or “hide your distracting female form in a more thorough manner, please, because I am acutely aware that you, as a woman, have breasts.”

There’s a pretty huge historical precedent for this not being okay. These acts are grounded in the practice of men feeling attracted to women and controlling the actions and appearance of women in order to assuage said attraction. Rather than addressing men’s sexual attraction or behaviour directly, we decide to control women’s behaviour - and we’ve seen this as the reasoning behind everything from mandating bee keeper costumes and keeping girls out of schools entirely to not allowing women outside unescorted and blaming victims when sexual violence occurs. And we’re supposed to be at a point in gender politics where were refuse to tolerate that shit. 

Plus, uniforms are a pretty obvious solution if school administrators are actually concerned with the presentability of their student body.

This blog posting is dedicated to Margaret Atwood, who is the less-likeable Canadian version of Ursula K. Le Guin

To Hurt and Be Hurt

We all, at some point, confront our own ability to both be harmed and inflict harm among others. Much of our lives can be shaped by our ability or inability to accept these fundamental capabilities.

(I say fundamental, because our ability to harm and be harmed concerns not only the most memorable and juicy bits of life, but perhaps also life itself. We are; in being we inflict ourselves upon the world around us, often upon the other beings existing around us. Thus we harm. Inevitably, too, the world around us hurts us - inevitably, some of those blows prove fatal. And so we are harmed.)

A couple weeks ago, I was escorting a man in the deserted upstairs hallways of the building where I worked. He was irritable, but that quickly turned to anger. He started yelling at me. Then, while yelling at me, suddenly he was holding an Xacto knife (American translation: box cutter) in his right hand, the blade exposed. “I’m not brandishing this,” he yelled, and then continued to yell, the knife exposed, until he turned his back to walk away and I darted behind a locked door and burst into tears.

The man would later appear incredulous and incensed at my (mis)interpretation of events: “I told her I wasn’t brandishing the knife!?” And I felt especially bad, because he’s gay, and it was Pride Week, and the whole situation felt very awkward - which just goes to show that even traditionally victimized people can be terrifying when holding knives whilst yelling at people. (...Progress towards equality? Yay?)

When relaying the tale to other staff members, both immediately and in the week that followed, all made attempts to be supportive, most of them genuine and heartfelt, some above and beyond. The only exception was a woman who found herself with two conflicting thoughts which could not, to her, coexist: the man was nice and she liked him vs. the man was holding a knife while yelling at Ivy.

I, too, liked the man - a little less so, now, but I wished him no ill will. I knew this action was out of character - dramatically so - and that it was proceeded by several months of declining mental health. But when I tried relaying that the man must have pulled out the knife (as he had not previously been holding it) and that the blade was exposed, this coworker interrupted:

“No.” She said. “Just - no. I can’t believe that happened.”

I’d encountered this same attitude when a former coworker slash former mutual friend had begun hitting on me and, after I declined, repeatedly yelled at me and behaved in a generally jerkish and intimidating manner. Despite admitting to having witnessed his yelling at me, she emphatically proclaimed that he didn’t really mean it, that I had misinterpreted everything, and while she was sad I felt that way, he was such a nice guy and he would never do anything to anybody.

She also said his yelling at me was kind of my own fault for not having responded to an email he sent me wherein he said that he was sorry that my stepfather had died.

No...just, no.

Whatever cognitive dissonance was occurring, it seemed to be about accepting that nice people sometimes do shitty things - that we, as adults, as people, are capable of hurting those around us. The response to which doesn’t have to be self hatred and flagellation, even - only acceptance and, maybe, hopefully, learning and attempts at reparation. And probably a stoppage to the yelling and wielding of knives. If that's okay.

...Please stop yelling at me.

Liver

The following is a partial transcription of my half of conversation occurring largely via text message earlier this evening, and supplemented by photographic evidence to better document the disturbing nature of what occurred:

I just had to rip apart a cow’s liver and it was disgusting.

Sad face.

...Why? I don’t know anymore!! It squished into liquid and the smell and I can still smell and I can still smell it! SAD FACE!

And Mustard keeps taking the liver out of the dog dish and laying it on the couch to...sit. And ooze liver into the furniture I love. And Mustard won’t actually eat the liver because it’s Toby’s liver, but Toby won’t eat the liver because Toby realizes that liver is not food. It is NOT food. It is a gross blob of ew.

Seriously, this has happened about six times. I keep moving the liver back but I have to use a giant wad of paper towel to touch it because the smell...

(Also I ran out of my regular dog food and everything went downhill from there.)

I can rip a steak in two. It’s easy. Because a steak doesn’t liquify in your hands and ooze between your clenched fingers and the smell...oh the smell. I washed my hands like five times and I can’t get the smell out.

It’s sitting on my couch right now. It’s an amorphous gelatinous blob the colour of rust. It’s like...have you ever seen a beached jellyfish? It’s like that. Or a placenta.

Pictured below: three terrifying things.

 

A Dolphin Tried to Have Sex With Me

It all began with the movie Red Hill.

Now, I am not saying that this modern western tale of betrayal and revenge is a great movie; objectively, it may not even be a good movie. But I can say without hesitation that my experience, watching it, was nothing short of a spectacular, and upon finishing the film and subsequently telling everyone I knew that they must too experience its wonder and glory, I found that I had changed. Red Hill had awoken something inside of me that had long lay dormant. Suddenly I remembered, with marked clarity, a desire that had last been voiced when I was no more than a seven or eight year old girl, wearing pigtails: I wanted to ride a horse.

Now, being a practical woman, I found myself painfully aware that riding a horses costs money. Not having a huge sum of money to spare, and feeling the guilt of spending said money on sudden horse-riding whimsy inspired by Australian B-movies, I hesitated. Perhaps my dream of riding majestic Fudgesicle into the sunset, the wind in our respective glossy manes, was not to be. Perhaps some fantasies are best kept to oneself.

And then an idea struck me like a thunderbolt: Staff Appreciation.

My employer has a longstanding tradition of showing gratitude to its employees in various ways, one of which is an annual outing to a random destination to engage in an activity which is, theoretically, designed to build camaraderie among staff. While I know of this tradition, I have not experienced it firsthand, and despite almost four years of full time labour I have yet to know the joy of, say, kayaking with my boss and coworkers on a frigid winter lake. This knowledge has long sown bitterness within my soul, so that I grew avoidant of the topic, lest I feel the pangs of thankless drudgery.

But now, suddenly, a golden - nay - palomino opportunity lay before me.

I would ride a horse, and I would do it as part of my long overdue Staff Appreciation Outing. My employer would pay me to  fulfill my newfound equine fantasy. And it would be magical.

I will not say exactly how I lay my plan in place - how I convinced my coworkers, one of whom was traumatized by a childhood horse attack and now suffered from a crippling equinophobia, another of whom was deemed medically unable to ride a horse due to lower back surgery - to band behind me with unanimous support.

How too I convinced my employer, who for years had avoided any such events, to commit to a date and activity, I cannot say for certain. It was a long, laborious process. Many times, I came close to giving up. And then I thought of Red Dawn, and about the noble police officer determined to defend his town and discovered the truth, at all costs, despite repeated serious injuries, a violent gunman on the loose, and almost being eaten by a panther.

Giving up was not an option.

And somehow, six months after my plan’s inception, I saw it finally at long last coming full fruition, and the very next day, Wednesday June 26, I was booked to go horseback riding in the British Columbia mountains with my coworkers, at no cost to myself.

And then my boss said, with a “what can you do” shrug, that he had cancelled Horseback Riding, because the weather app on his phone told him it was certainly going to rain. Instead we would have a staff meeting and then maybe we’d do something else.

I blinked, and heard the distant neighing of noble steads fall silent.

...

To say that my mood was poor, during the morning staff meeting of Wednesday June 26, would be an understatement. It started out with my spilling my coffee all over my coat, which was unfortunate, and had the side effect of robbing me of vital caffeine. The meeting ran long, and when asked about staff appreciation that afternoon, the usual cacophony of half-baked ideas and vocal dissent ensued. I feared no consensus would be reached. I knew that nothing would compare to my plan, so close to fulfillment, so cruelly quashed. Someone suggested we go bowling.

I could feel a stinging pang within my chest, and I knew that my heart was breaking.

I excused myself to the washroom and took an antacid, because heartburn also causes stinging chest pain, and when I returned to the room my coworkers informed me of the plan made in my absence.

We were going for lunch, and then to the aquarium.

In retrospect, some or all of the sadness I felt may have been the result of low blood sugar, because lunch helped my mood considerably. Upon arrival at the aquarium, my disappointment had all but faded away entirely, because: Sea Otters and Jellyfish.

And then there were penguins. And two orphaned dolphins. (I strongly object to dolphins  and whales in captivity, because of the movie The Cove, but these guys were orphaned and rescued as babies and thus lack the life skills they’d need in the wild, so my guilt was assuaged.) I discovered that I could play peek-a-boo with my new dolphin friend, and he seemed to enjoy it. A lot.

...

...

And that is the story of how I saw my first erect dolphin penis. Because apparently I am arousing to dolphins.

Behavioural Neuroscience and Hannibal: the TV Show

Subtitle: Why Is No One Giving Will Graham A Hug?

Most readers won’t know this - as most people in my life don’t, so it would be weird if you did - but I originally attended university in the hopes of pursuing a degree in behavioural neuroscience. This, of course, was just a fancy title to put on my application to med school, where I hoped to pursue a specialty in emergency medicine or psychiatry, but plans went terribly array so that’s neither here nor there.

What ended these plans was a bout of serious depression and my withdraw from my undergraduate program, my hopes of becoming a physician, and finally university altogether. I likely knew, even before I enrolled, that I was suffering from a mental illness - stemming from a sensitivity drawn out in my dna and prenatal environment, and set into motion by a childhood bathed in neglect, trauma, and periodic abuse at the hands of others, who were also, in their own right, traumatized and mentally ill. Why else would I have pursued a profession so tied up with my own experience? But this knowledge was never explicit and I avoided, as long as I could, any of its terrifying implications.

But this post wasn’t supposed to be about me. Hmm. Let’s get back to Hannibal and Will.

Hannibal, the character, is a spectacular psychopath - the sort of monster who fascinates and speaks to dark curiosity and sense of the macabre. We want to know why and how he does the (fictional) things he does. This dark wonder has led to four novels and six movies in which Hannibal is a central character. (Only five? What? Instinct WASN’T the story of Hannibal Lecter’s cunning evasion of police through posing as an anthropologist studying a remote band of highland gorillas and finally discovering, in them, the sense of community he never experienced was his fellow man? WHAT?!) And this year, those watching NBC’s Hannibal have discovered a new version of Empire Magazine’s Eighth Greatest Character of the last twenty years.

Hannibal the Psychiatrist’s intense sense of enigmatic evil is matched only in the sheer adorability of central character and muffin Will Graham - the instructor turned special investigator for the FBI who is described as having an empathy disorder akin to “the opposite of autism.” He is easily drawn into the world of others, seeing into their experience with an uncanny intuitive clarity which leaves him, after, feeling shell shocked and terrified. Will sees through the eyes of brutal killers - feeling as though he himself may have committed their crimes - and uses this skill to help stop them from killing again.

So why bring up my history at all, you ask? Why describe myself in a paragraph next to what could be seen as praise for the most notorious fictional serial killer of all time? That seems like a weird and potentially incriminating thing to do.

I bring up me only because my history, education, subsequent work* in mental health, and unending curiosity regarding neuropsychiatry has made watching Hannibal a special kind of torture.

*I work with adults with psychiatric disabilities as a community mental health worker for an innercity non-profit - many of my clients struggle with homelessness and addiction. But I don’t work here because I’m trying to pray on society’s most vulnerable a la Hannibal. Because I’m not. Oh god I’m just making it worse aren’t I.

In this week’s episode (spoiler, obviously), it is revealed that muffin-face Will Graham is suffering from anti-NMDA reception encephalitis, a rare disorder which is, in the show, described as degenerative and untreatable. Not that they try and treat it - Hannibal and a surprisingly complicity neurologist are both happy to leave Will without even the knowledge that he’s suffering from an illness, all the better to watch him de compensate and study the path of his downward trajectory.

Also mentioned this episode are Mirror Neurons - a type of cell in the brain which reacts identically when viewing a behaviour or preforming a behaviour, believed by some to play a role in human empathy. This connection, however, is dubious at best and very poorly understood - Hannibal may or may not know this, and it may or may not be sloppy writing.

Cotard’s delusion, spatial neglect, prosopagnosia - all fascinating neurological symptoms featured in this week’s episode and distorted by both Hannibal the character and Hannibal the TV show to best achieve their nefarious means. Their goal is, of course, to ensnare their hapless audience - Will Graham and myself, respectively. We are told only distorted fragments of the truth.

(Speaking of the truth, anti-NMDA reception encephalitis is often a form of paraneoplastic syndrome - a reaction of the immune system in response to underlying cancer cells elsewhere in the body; see House for further details. It occurs almost exclusively in women and leads to death or permanent neurological damage in about a quarter of its patients - the other 75% make a full recovery.)

Up until this weeks’ episode, I had rejected the possibility of a neurological diagnosis for Will. Others had not, proposing any number of strokes and tumors which could have resulted in his specific symptomatology. I clung, wrongly, to the belief that Will, like so many others, was reacting as best he could to an onslaught of trauma outside of his control. He dissociated (like a soldier going through the motions amidst an onslaught of horror in battle, later having no conscious memory of events). He misinterpreted ambiguous stimuli (like the PTSD sufferer who’s hyper-vigilance leads them to jump at the slightest movement, or the abused child who hears distant laughter and interprets it as screaming). He suffered from night sweats, headaches, and nightmares (like...everyone when stressed out or traumatized, I think?).

Will had, previously, shown all the symptoms which I believed to be characteristic of stress, and our minds' spectacular ability to protect itself from that which we feel we cannot handle. Will’s symptoms were extreme and increasingly terrifying, for both himself and the viewer - but not outside of logical possibility. This is what trauma survivors do. We tune out, and repress, and distract ourselves endlessly in an effort to avoid overwhelming emotions.

We write three-page long blog articles on obscure neurological conditions and the character Hannibal Lecter, all in an attempt to avoid finishing an episode of a TV show because Will doesn’t know he has encephalitis and is sad and afraid and WHY IS NO ONE GIVING HIM A HUG???

Ahem.

I return to my video player with an increasing sense of unease.

Death, Cancer, and Sexy Organs

If we live long enough, we’ll all eventually get cancer. On a long enough timeline, we may all be struck by lightening, too, and an infinite number of monkeys on an infinite number of typewriters will reproduce the works of Shakespeare (except that all the major characters will be monkeys and there will be much more flinging of feces), but these scenarios are all very abstract. We don’t have infinite time. We have years, decades, some of us more than others. And within that time frame, cancer can and will appear.

If you need proof of this, look only to your testicles (or, for women and eunuchs and testicular cancer survivors, look to your metaphoric testicles). Relatively complex organs geared towards reproduction and surging with exciting bodily hormones, testicles are a prime location for the generation of errant tissue and, in fact, testicular cancer is all but guaranteed for men who live to the age of 80.

(This isn’t actually a health problem, because your average 80-year-old will die long before their testicular cancer has any negative impact on their health. Which is why routine screening for testicular cancer in senior patients is no longer advised. The more you know.)

Looking for the female equivalent of the time-bomb-esque testicles, we find the breasts and the ovaries - sexual organs whose cancer rates are similarly high. Ovarian cancer is known for being deadly (as it has easily ignored symptoms and cannot readily be screened for), and breast cancer is known for being a giant pink clad diva which hogs air time and funding dollars. (All the other cancers are jealous of breast cancer.)

Every period a woman has elevates her risk of breast cancer, and so, for fertile menstruating women, that risk is steadily rising over time. Women in time’s past had it easy, what with constantly starving, being pregnant, and/or breastfeeding, cutting their overall number of periods and thus their breast cancer risk. Not so for today’s women, who’s rates of breast cancer have never been higher.

(Sidenote: this link between overall number of periods and breast cancer risk is a constant source of odd demographics and perplexed news articles: Earlier periods linked to breast cancer! Eating ice-cream regularly linked to breast cancer! Childhood obesity linked to breast cancer! More sex equals less breast cancer!

Childhood obesity can cause earlier onset of puberty, which means a larger number of periods over a woman’s lifetime. Having a certain amount of body fat and dietary fat is necessary for women to menstruate, hence more ice cream equals more periods. And sex is linked to pregnancy, which lowers a woman’s risk of breast cancer by filling her womb with fetus, causing fewer periods.)

The point of which is: I found a lump in my breast and had to go for an ultrasound and it was really scary. It wasn’t cancer, it was just lumpy breast. But it was scary. I’m glad I don’t have cancer.

The end.