Bowling Balls and Cyborgs

The bowling alley took a chunk out of my ball!

Chunk is defined as a volume of the ball, roughly pyramidic, about 1 x 2 x .75 inches.
It was during practice. I was trying to keep my hand the way I had it last week, that enabled me to do so well. About a third of the time, it would stray toward the gutter. Nothing wrong with that, normally it works itself out as I get a good rhythm going, and by the time we started, I would've been fine.

So I let go. Immediately I know it's off. It hits the gutter, reaches near to the end, and then flips out, bangs against the pinsetter, and falls. My heart sank, and I brooded over the ball return. It arrived, and I picked it up, looking it over minutely. Then I realized what one of my hands was feeling. A chunk... I turned it around. Beneath the surface, the material appeared glassy, consistent in color to the rest... it would've been beautiful, if it were a rock or anything but a bowling ball. My ball. The one Dad got me not three months ago.

I can still bowl with it, but it's sort of like having a car without a trunk lid. It's technically possible, but do you have the heart to drive it, unless you absolutely need to? It doesn't look right, and because you know what it's missing, it doesn't feel right either.

I bowled three games, did good in one, terrible in one, and mediocre in one, in reverse order. The UC is good for spare practice, where the ball doesn't matter that much, but... this is yet another reason why next fall I will probably be bowling elsewhere.

Curt did alright. We won 1.5 games. The other two teammates didn't show up. They typically come late, which irritates my punctuality or better rule, where we have to make excuses for them, asking to wait just 5 minutes. They're obliging of course, but we shouldn't always have to do that. They aren't coming from class or dinner...
Otherwise, my day was quite good.

Among other things, we read an excerpt from a feminist who tries to compare the experience of marginalized groups with that of a cyborg. A cyborg, she says, is a figure without an origin, an initial unity. Made up of constituent parts after the fact, of tools that are already around, they nevertheless gain a wholeness without an appeal to an initial origin. In the same way, marginalized workers come from outside a structure, without any origin within it, and learn to exist.

I follow it, I think, but I wonder what she sees as a cyborg. I must be missing the necessary literature on them. I think that using a cyborg here is very hard. They are humans enhanced by machinery in some way. I don't see, beyond that experience of put-togetherness, how they relate. Then again, that's why it's a metaphor.

There's Ed from Full Metal Alchemist (anime), who has a robotic arm and leg, "automail" that he had to receive after losing the limbs from a failed attempt at alchemically reviving his mom (he used them to save his younger brother and instill him in a suit of armor). Ziggurat 8 (Ziggy) from Xenosaga (game) sold his body upon his death to be brought back to life as a cyborg, and he forms connections with an organically engineered girl to become a father-figure to her. In the Dune series (book), the repeatedly recreated ghola Duncan Idaho gains a realization of his place and finally finds love and escapes the machinations of those Tleilaxu that keep creating him. There's Darth Vader, who despite being entrapped in robotic parts and consumed by his anger, eventually comes to reconciliation and redemption by his son. There's Robocop, the Six Million Dollar Man, not to mention the many men and women who need replacement limbs and mechanical aids to help them perform rudimentary functions in daily life. Asimov wrote a short story about people choosing to get metallic limbs for the idea of it, even after organic prosthetic limbs were possible.

She could have explored how a cyborg does not have to be different, on the level of practice, from any other person, save in capability. They too can form families, bonds, and though they are enhanced or enabled by their equipment, that need not imply a difference in social response, a difference in mental capability. It can, but it need not. So, in creating a cyborg, are we adorning the person from before, or creating a new person? She would have the latter occur. That's where the metaphor breaks down, because she doesn't account for why cyborgs become cyborgs. Is there no continuity between parts and whole? Why is the idea of unity or origin denied to a cyborg, when in many cases they can yet find it for themselves, and many people who aren't cyborgs spend all their lives trying to find it?

I think she uses them as a metaphor too flippantly, and though what they illustrate is important, it's gotten through ill means.