Body, Your

(A chapter in YOU HAVE UPSET THE BALANCE OF THE UNIVERSE BY BEING BORN: Advice on How to Live by Dr Robert MacLean, PhD: http://robertmaclean.blogspot.com/p/you-have-upset-balance-of-universe-by.html. Watch this space for the next chapter.)

You are a little shocked by the fact of having a body. To be in the world is one thing; to be a body in it is quite something else. You wake, sit on the side of the bed and see yourself in milady's mirror, as much an apparition to yourself as to anyone else. What is going on?
The Doctor reports that very often in his adult life when he has looked at his watch it has either been on the hour or thirteen minutes past. Two times out of three, say. Is his body doing that?
(The Doctor by the way does not have a wrist manacle. It is rude to wear them in the evening--see MANNERS--and the phones have replaced them anyway.)
Getting a haircut, examining your imperfections in a new mirror, you conclude again that you're OK, you look good. You don't know how you do it. Exercise for you is walking around while you floss.
It must be a gift. You think you're enchanted. You think you're an exception. You think you're a special case. Now: is thinking so different from being so? (See REALITY.)
But what kind of gift is it? You are your body and yet there are robotic aspects about it, the wiring and sealed cables and so forth. It makes you nervous. Your hypochondriasis drives you to excesses of sunscreen and time-release vitamins. Your interrogations of partners before and after the sex act are brutal, brutal. And if the Hindus are right and you do reincarnate, will you always be this lucky?