[4] Burying people was the best thing we ever did, as a species. That was the nicest thing we ever did for one another.
[6] For months, I refused to eat french-cut green beans even though they were healthy, cornless, and plentiful, because of the story my mom used to tell about when she worked in a green bean cannery in Oregon in her 20s, before she went to grad school and became an intellectual and everything: There were two kinds of green beans in the canning factory-regular and french-cut. And basically everything that wasn't an attractive, normal-looking green bean went into the french-cut pile, and one day my mom was sorting through the french cut green beans in this gigantic vat and the slicer thing that cut the beans frenchly came along and sliced off the top third of her right pinky finger. So they shut down the factory and while my mom was hustled off to the hospital all the other workers at the factory searched through the massive vat of french-cut green beans for the finger with no luck, and after about an hour, the factory supervisor said, "Screw it. It's just the french-cut," and started production back up. That isn't the distressing part of the story. The distressing part of the story is that no one ever wrote the factory to say, you know, we opened up this can of french cut green beans and couldn't help but notice the top third of a manicured pinky finger in our goddamned green beans. This left two equally horrifying possibilities: first, that some American family somehow managed to unknowingly eat my mother's finger, or else that somewhere out there, even now, there is still a container of french-cut green beans featuring mom's finger, this latter possibility rendered even more multivalent vis-a-vis the existential implications of eating french-cut green beans by the fact that if by some miracle my mom's finger is still floating somewhere in some can of french-cut green beans all these years later, that is the only part of her body still, like, here-the only remains I might recover. But anyway, I would submit to you that one of the less-lame definitions of personhood is the unwillingness to do certain perfectly reasonable things (like for instance eating french cut beans) for deeply personal or sentimental reasons (like for instance a sense of fidelity to your mother's lost finger). That ship sailed for me that afternoon in Caroline's windowless room, which is probably why I remember it in the first place.
[8] And therefore being. Anyone? Anyone? Cogito ergo sum jokes? No? Okay.
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