the chlorophyll hypothesis

okay, so basically i am in the adjustment phase. or, if we want to be sophisticated, we can call it high-functioning stagnation. i am sitting here at my desk with my laptop open, ostensibly (yes, let us add a new word to the vocabulary, because that brain i have is not that tiny, it remembers everything) doing something productive. but mostly, i am just letting the noise of silence in the room amplify the chaos of my own unhinged mind. i am trying to distract myself from the reality i have at hand.

let me paint a picture for you about the time i was in the second or third grade.

back then, we were not allowed to have access to the internet. since i was a studious kid, i would spend my time reading books or watching pogo from eight to nine in the evening. i spent way too much time overthinking how cartoon physics worked like. how danny phantom was somehow half-ghost and half-boy. my brain was constantly looking for the exact mechanism behind impossible morphs.

so naturally, when i studied animal cells and plant cells for the first time, things escalated...

since i had never met a vegetarian or even seen one, i came up with a theory that became an underlying fact for me: vegetarians are green.

the science was that the chlorophyll, which gives pigmentation to the plant cell, would attack human cells when veggies were eaten in abundance and morph into the cytoplasm to give the human a green color. it was not a guess. it was cellular absorption. i had the whole process mapped out, a terrifying and leafy slow-motion mutation. if you eat the greens, you become the greens. it was simple, aggressive biology. i had the entire morphing process going on in my mind, just like how spider-man’s dna tweaked after that spider bite, only mine involved more kale and a very slow transition.

gamora fan forevermy theory coming to life?

i did not realize until my twenties, while watching guardians of the galaxy, that i had been unknowingly primed for gamora. i sat there watching her, perfectly green and perfectly capable, and my brain did not think alien. it thought, ah, finally. someone who actually stuck to the diet. it makes so much more sense than whatever marvel was going for. it is the logical conclusion of a childhood spent convinced that our insides were just waiting for the right ingredients to override our exterior.

It makes sense that I’m currently staring at AI-generated slop where human faces melt into broccoli and thinking, finally. It’s not that I want to be a plan, though, on days like today, photosynthesis sounds like a remarkably efficient career move. It’s that I’m realizing my childhood obsession wasn’t about science at all. It was about a desperate, early-onset need to be anything other than a predictable biological system. I wanted a cheat code for being human. And now, in a world where we’re actively coding the humanity right out of everything, I’m starting to wonder if I didn't just spend my entire childhood waiting for the technology to catch up to my own imagination.

i spend my days working with logic and code and the way systems evolve, but i think i prefer the primitive, cartoon-science logic of my nine-year-old self. it was a time when i believed that if i just ate enough spinach, i could become something else entirely. maybe my nine-year-old self was right all along. the transition was just waiting on better hardware.

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