atomization

This is what happens when advanced technologies swallow us whole. Note the rapture on their faces and the eerie obliviousness to their photo being taken.

I don't know what's wrong with me but I've started a terrible habit of starting to prepare for the class I'm teaching only after the clock ticks over at midnight the night before. Though it shouldn't be such a surprise to me that I'm heartily maintaining my reputation as a first-rate procrastinator, I still wish I weren't so irresponsible sometimes, especially when the higher learning of tomorrow's leaders is at stake. I teach a class of about 20 students. All of them very sweet and enthusiastic. Or maybe they're very clever suck-ups. Either way, I feel somehow like I'm cheating them out of something. What that is I'm not sure but if I were a better teacher maybe it would be more clear to me.

The way that I have mastered procrastination could possibly be used in a case study of some kind. Instead of reading up on "Imperialism and Technology", the topic of tomorrow's discussion, I actually find myself sitting here ruminating on a strange experience I had earlier today in my exercise class where I had the unexpected delight of working out in a sea of porn stars. Living in LA is so endlessly exciting. It relieves much of the normal ennui of any average grad student elsewhere. So much to see. So much cleavage to admire.

Now I have never been one to particularly envy ladies with big racks. Much thanks to my first boyfriend who gave me the lasting gift of making me comfortable with my body, small boobs and all. But still, when confronted unexpectedly with size double D's in an extremely crowded kickboxing class, you start to take notice and succumb to their power. I think I must have mistakenly taken the porn star kickboxing class tonight. I realized only too late that almost everyone in there knew each other and they all happened to have massive breast enlargements. Porn stars have awfully skinny asses too. And they dress almost exclusively in pink. I dare say I may have been the most small-breasted lady in the room, not excluding the dudes.

The point of bringing this up is not to ridicule porn stars or the porn industry for that matter. But rather to note that it is a strange feeling to be in a room full of people most of whom have been surgically enhanced. It feels as if the fictive sci-fi world of cylons and cyborgs has finally arrived but it is nothing like we had imagined. Our writers and filmmakers were a bit deluded by creating machines in our image that were elegant and beautiful. If we take the cylons in "Battlestar Galactica" as a prime example, all the cylon women thus far have been totally flat-chested. But no one has correctly projected that our reality is much more twisted. And that machines, idealized in human form, would be sporting fairly obscene anatomically incongruous appendages bolted to their chests.

At least "Gattica" was on the right track with its theme of genetic engineering, but it too failed to represent the actual path that our societies have taken. In this case, sci-fi is much more rational and civilized than reality. If, that is, we accept that our reality and the future trajectory of human civilization, is one heavily invested in the production and reproduction of gigantic gravity-defying jugs.