José Ortega y Gasset: Eulogy of Eukaryotes

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Sometimes it seems that everyone I meet is dead on the outside. It is a little disturbing, but maybe they are just trying to attract some Mendelian specimens. Personally, I find the systematic genocide I have festering inside more alarming. I do not want to inflate my importance, but it leaves me with billions of bodies to bury, and where I put them could affect if I will have clean enough water to exfoliate away my dust mite food. According to José Ortega y Gasset I am my circumstance, so by extension, I am nothing but my own dead cells.
Now, although the cells keeling over in my gut affect my well-being, it is inarguable that my skin cells affect what really matters - my social life. I refer to the unspoken competitive snobbery that goes on between the upper 10% blessed with dust mite allergy (Clot). Although opinions differ, Zyrtec is factually the most prestigious medicine a fourth grader could take. It is a privilege well-earned because desquamation - the process of shedding dead skin cells - tirelessly lobs off over one thousand cells from one square centimeter of forearm flesh per hour to feed Dermatophagoides farinae, the common dust mite. (Rob) (Clot) Along with a nightly does of a liter of sweat, my cells furnish the production of mite-secreted enzymes, which proportionately affects the itchiness of my eyes. In effect, my own dead cells caused me asthma and fever systems, a circumstance which played a role from delivering me from band, to visual arts. (Clot) However, the effect of dead cells has always played a role in a transformation several orders of magnitude larger since the agricultural revolution.
Each day my body will typically flip the switch on over 10 billion cell via programmed death -...

... middle of paper ...

...ys govern the human machine. However, I wonder, even as steel girders defied gravity around him in the industrial age, if he could have known just how much our circumstance is we, just as we are our circumstance.

Works Cited

Clotuche, Dermauw, et al. " House dust mites: Agents of allergy." Acari. Web. Dec 15th, 2013

Roberts D., Marks R. "The Determination of Regional and Age Variation in the Rate of Desquamation: A comparison of Four Techniques." Nature.com. 1980 . Web. Dec 13th 2013 < http://www.nature.com/jid/journal/v74/n1/pdf/5616091a.pdf>.

Alberts B, Johnson A, Lewis J, et al. "Programmed Cell Death." National Center for Biotechnology. 2002. Web. Dec 14th 2013

Montague, Pete. "Excrement Happens." TheEcolgist.info. The Ecologist Volume 29 Number 4, July 1999. Web. Dec 17th, 2013

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