Human: A Rambling Account of Being a

I was walking outside of my front porch and I noticed a cockaroach. Brown, motionless, and fat. I couldn’t tell if it was frozen with fear or frozen with an all-familiar laziness which I am well accustomed with. I stared at this roach for an incredibly long quarter-of-a-minute (it’s a relatively long time to be staring at a bug at 3:14 ante meridiem Pacific Standard time). I could have stared at it for entire minutes and probably would have formulated a deductive-reasoning exercise, in the form of a standardized, multiple-choice format, which I am so used to doing in the face of any potential problem.

For the following questions, answer in a #2 pencil by completely filling in the correct answer. Hrmm…even in my own brain, I can’t seperate the #2 pencils from multiple-choice decision-making.

1) Why is the cockaroach completely still?
A) Dead.
B) Asleep.
C) Lazy.
D) Something to do with it being cold out. I don’t know if bugs fit into the category of ‘Cold-Blooded’ animals, but if they are, then it definitely has something to do with it. Are bugs animals? Do they even have ‘blood’? I remember my 3rd grade teacher telling me a story about how she went hiking in the Sierra Nevada on a cold morning. On her hike she saw a rattlesnake that was curled up in striking position; the only reason that she survived to become a plump and elderly 3rd grade teacher was the fact that it was cold out and this stopped the snake from building enough energy to move. So it could be that. I also know that the longer multiple choice answers are usually a good sign that they’re the correct ones, so this answer’s looking pretty sweet.

But that’s what I could have done.

What I did instead was used my foot in a pinball-machine gesture to launch the cockaroach off the porch. For all of you that participated in the above multiple-choice question, the answer was definitely not A)…the bastard ran pretty fast into the night.

[In Korean, Cockaroaches are litterally called “Wheel-Bugs”. They are called this because of the unifying fact that Cockaroaches are fast, and that there’s nothing in the Korean vocabulary that’s faster than the all-powerful wheel.]

Well…actually I lied. Sometimes I do this. Well…a lot of the time I do this.
I lie.

For the sake of artisitc license, I said that it wasn’t possible for me to formulate that multiple-choice, decision-making mechanism, but I guess I did. Sure it wasn’t as polished and presentable, but I did start thinking about what that Cockaroach was thinking about when it lay motionless. It’s a world that I could not really enter. Even if science did progress to the point where I could (temporarily) have my consciousness inserted into the consciousness of that Cockaroach, that’d probably be years down the line and I doubt that that same Cockaroach would be alive or found. There are also the logistical problems of re-creating that exact same night; all the conditions would have to be reproduced to get that Cockaroach in the same state of mind. He could have had a fight with his wife earlier that day, could’ve been promoted to Assistant Regional Manager that day, or just had vistited the Dentist’s office, the normal things a cockaroach may do over the course of his day.

Or maybe the answer lies in pulling the Cockaroach’s memories and uploading them into my own mind. In the future, they might come up with a memory preservation machine, and then further down the line, make models for all species: first with mice, then monkies, then humans, then dogs, then cats, and so-on-and-so-forth. Some nerd’ll then figure out a way to translate Cockaroach brain waves into an acceptable Human format. Everyone’s probably wondered what possible pleasure a dog can get from chasing its own tail. Maybe there’ll be a way to experience this firsthand through some fantabulous machine. (But then again, they still haven’t found a way to bridge the simplest executable programs across Windows and Mac OSes…maybe this is a long-shot too).

I think I may have rambled a bit here.

Recap::
Problem: I don’t know what that Cockaroach was thinking.
Possible Solution: Create a machine that collects memories and translates them for my understanding.

I guess this is the point where the introduction stops, and where the real analysis begins.