Bad Punchline: 2012 Resolution

I'm not really big on resolutions for New Years because they seem sort of silly and arbitrary to me. I'm not against wanting to lose weight or quit smoking but if you require a mystical backing such as our baseless calender system in order to find the will to do something it seems unlikely that you will succeed in it. If you want to do something like lose weight or quit smoking then you should do it. On the other hand, however, while it is illogical to create resolutions I doubt that the tradition is going to stop anytime soon so I try to view it as a form of personal amusement. I think it's a little funny when other people fail theirs and it gives me a good excuse to say something bizarre to see how people react to it. So this year I have resolved to survive the End of the World. Again. I was nine years old the first time they told me the world was going to end. Evidently God is fond of big round numbers. Or I guess that was the theory. Apparently I survived the end of the world a couple times prior to then without even realizing it and in the past year I survived it twice more (all of these predicted by the same man). Due to the incredible lack of logic in betting that the world is going to end I choose to bet that the world is going to continue on. I think that this is a resolution that anyone over the age of ten can agree on. Resolve to survive the End of the World with me. Again.

Long-haired Freaky People

You may recognize the title as part of the opening line in a song called Signs by the Five Man Electrical Band. If not, that's okay! It was written over forty years ago and I suspect a good percentage of you are not that old. But if you like your music retro or you have to listen to oldies for some reason it's a pretty good song. I used to have it on my iPod, in fact, even though it was written a full two decades before I was born (my enjoyment of both oldies/classic rock and alternative rock seems to be a constant source of frustration and confusion for Pandora). But the point of that? Of course there's a point; I have lately been considering growing my hair out. Not to be fashionable in any way or because I think this will particularly improve my appearance. I'm certainly not doing it because I feel nostalgic about my long-hair phase growing up. I've been considering it because my nephew's mother said she would quit smoking if I did.

I've been thinking about it for over a week. I thought I should maybe do the logical thing and weigh the pros and cons. Pros: My nephew's mother quits smoking. Cons: I have to grow my hair. This was far less helpful than you might think. Hair clearly ought to be less important than getting my nephew's mother to quit smoking but obviously there's a reason she thinks my hair is important enough to me to be worth it to her to help her quit smoking. So what follows this will be a history lesson about my hair. This may seem to imply that I am a huge narcissist so I must assure you that this is not true (although my ego, on the other hand, is another story).

When I was young I had the same haircut for years. Why? Because I was a little kid and I didn't care much. It was short. It didn't get tangled up in things or require lots of brushing. I had what my mother always referred to as a "cap cut" which, judging by a google images search, does not actually mean anything. When I got older my oldest brother and I both had our longest hair style (not coincidentally) at around the same time (when I was twelvish). My oldest brother grew his hair out because he was going to go into the Navy but he had to wait quite some time before actually going to Basic (which I believe was mostly to do with how long you have to wait after you stop taking ADD medication before you can enter but when you score in the 99th percentile they are willing to wait) so in the meantime he decided to grow out his hair. In his entrance photo thing he has hair more than down to his shoulders and looks a lot like I imagine the protagonist in the "Signs" song does. At the same time my hair was the longest it has ever been.

The problem lies not in the teasing or anything like that or the fact that it bothered my mother. 'Hair is hair. It grows.' That's something that my mother would say. It didn't bother her how we wanted it cut or if we wanted to dye it. The problem is the quality of my hair. Jared and I both have thick hair (an unusual quality for a redhead) but where his is sort of coarse and difficult to get a comb through sheerly because of the thickness my hair is.... not like that. While I have many strands of hair, making it thick, each individual strand is very, very fine. Add in the fact that I actually liked to play outside in the woods with the sticks and the pitch. Or I would sleep on it without plaiting it or putting it in a ponytail at least. And I hated brushing it. Hated it because I have a sensitive scalp and I can't just yank the brush through the tangles the way my mother does hers. So basically my hair was a tangled mess that, as I could not braid my own hair, and didn't want to brush it, required the attention of another person a lot. And for some ungodly reason I kept it that way for quite a while.

I finally had it all cut off between seventh and eighth grade and I remember moving my head and marveling at how light it felt. I'd actually had enough hair to cut off to donate it to Locks of Love so some little girl or boy has a pretty red wig that used to be my awful unkempt hair. But since then I haven't really had it long enough to need a brush. I prefer a hairstyle that looks like it's supposed to be messy because my hair sort of does that anyway. I don't keep it super-short because my hair grows fast and if I wanted it that way it would require constant cutting. Because of my bad experience with long hair I'd prefer to keep more or less the same shaggy mess I've had for years.

On the other hand I am an adult and I do own a brush so I ought to be able to keep my own hair tangle-free. My hair also isn't really short (as I mentioned) to begin with and it grows fast so I figure I can have it down to the specified length by about December. I wouldn't lose my job (or not get one like the guy in "Signs") and if the appearance bothers me immensely I suppose a hat and some hairpins would fix that. There's no huge downside other than my reservations. Six months of annoying hair versus helping my nephew's mother quit smoking? I think I know which one I'll choose. I think I'll need to invest in some hair elastics. After all: "Hair is hair. It grows."

All Your Cells Are Cancerous

Cancer is treated as bad and horrible and foreign. It steals resources from your body and produces endless cells with no use that press on your organs and wither them. It creates at random making a twisted mass of tissue that appears alien in a way we associate with gristly horror movies. Cancer in one place in your body may never be noticed until you die of other causes and are autopsied. Cancer in another place may steal your memories from you and all your comfort. Cancer in yet another place or a different one or, in fact, any number of places will take your very life from you in service of its sinister creation of more new cells carrying its mutated DNA.

Cancer is not some tiny mite that sneaks into your body and starts propagating. It's not a bacteria or cold that infects you and festers in your body. It is not some tiny alien seed that gets to you through the air and proceeds to grow inside you. It does have many causes. Chemicals can cause cancer. Radiation can cause cancer. Smoking (though that's mostly the chemicals). Asbestos. The sun. Mostly things boil down to chemicals or radiation even though there are many different names for different kinds and different causes. One of the most blatant causes gets less attention than others. Old age. I guess old people die anyway but young people who get cancer caused by chemicals are a tragedy. Even birth control pills can cause cancer (though not for the reasons you think.)

The description is wrong, though. People do not "get" cancer. It is not catching. Everyone has cancer. Every single person in the entire world. And if they don't have cancer they have another kind of problem entirely. Namely, death. So which would you rather have? Cancer, which can kill you or the lack there of which will cause you to be dead much faster? Evolution chose cancer, obviously. If cancer wasn't good for us in some way than we wouldn't evolved so that every single cell in our body was cancerous. All of them. Your entire body festers with cancer from the moment you are born.

Before you become too bothered I will explain. "Cancer" is actually nothing more than the uncontrolled multiplication of cells. You could say that every time a woman becomes pregnant there's a "cancer" in her womb. Except that it's a special kind of parasitic cancer that grows into something adorable that we feel a biological imperative to love and cherish even though it's just a mass of cancer. Your cells divide and multiply as they grow old and need to be replaced or if you're injured. It happens constantly. But the reason that your cells don't divide out of control all the time is a special gene sequence that can be turned on and off to keep cells from dividing. Division is their natural state after all. But because division causes the DNA in your cells to literally unravel you want to avoid too much of it. That's where the special gene sequence comes in to force your cells to stop dividing unless it's necessary.

What causes the cancer in reality is that gene sequence becoming dysfunctional. Once it's broken it divides and, of courses, passes on the broken gene to the daughter cells which divide again. And again and again and again. Until it's stopped. Or it consumes you. Ironically two of the things that cause cancer are also used to destroy it. Chemical therapy and radiation treatments. Another cause of cancer is old age. By necessity your cells must divide in order to keep you alive. But though the division is normally not as rapid it does slowly unravel the DNA in your cells. The more it unravels and the older you get the more likely it is that the natural division of your cells will cause that very same gene to become broken and the already aged cells to begin to divide out of control.

Much like old age is the way in which Birth Control causes cancer. I know that women get prescribed birth control fairly often to "regulate" their cycles or to reduce the severity of the symptoms. But the way in which birth control pills are designed to work with one week of a placebo pill in the round dispenser forces a woman to have a period once in every twenty-eight days. Though you might be under the misconception that this is "normal" the fact is that women were not designed by evolution to have their cycles every twenty-eight days. Modern women go through three hundred or more cycles in their lifetime and it's not sheerly because they live longer. It's perfectly natural for a adult woman to go almost two years without ovulating. So why do we have a pill that forces a woman to have it once a month? Well, mostly because of the church but the real answer is that we shouldn't. Especially as all that extraneous cell-division caused by the egg bursting through the wall of the ovary every month leads to a higher cancer rate. And not just a higher cancer rate in the ovaries but a higher cancer rate in the breasts caused by the progesterone and estrogen in the pill making a woman's body think it's a little bit pregnant. And I won't even get started on the fact that diet causes breast cancer in men.

So it's not so much that there are more things around us that "give" us cancer these days. And it's not so much the fact that we live longer and have time for more cell divisions. It has a lot more to do with the fact that our cells naturally want to be cancerous. Of course there are things we could do to help prevent that from happening (like reducing radiation levels and changing the way birth control works) but those things don't change the truth. Because the truth is that all your cells are cancerous and there's nothing you can consciously do about it. Are you scared yet? You should be.

Seriously though, we've been doing all right with this cancer thing in the last few thousand years before the advent of modern medicine. I wouldn't worry about it too much. After all, if we didn't have cancer we'd all be dead.