Mrs G surprised me somewhat by asking how life was going. At first I took this to be a pleasantry about my personal disposition, but no, it actually was a question about life.
Was I pleased that, on some planets, this had progressed beyond the bacterial form? Well, to be honest, the answer is mostly "no".
I never have any trouble with bacteria while complex forms almost invariably do cause me grief. Not for the obvious reasons - which is to say lending an ear to their winging and whining, saving them from this or that catastrophe or giving a toss about whether they are good or bad (I mean, try defining it). Those who have followed my journal so far will know that intervention in the affairs of entities is a Very Bad Idea. No, the grief comes from my bunch of layabout stakeholders who for some reason do seem to give a rat's arse. More on that later.
I had to tick Mrs G off for her use of "progressed". This smacks of what one can only charitably call "complexism", or an irrational admiration of complex organisms. To go from your standard molecule to self-replication molecules to a living bacterium is a hefty haul. To glue a couple of trillion of them together to make a "complex" organism is pretty simple.
To make clear what I mean, if getting to the bacterial stage is this difficult:
/----/----/----/----/----/
then getting to the gin and tonic stage only takes us to here:
/----/----/----/----/----/--
Perplexed and somewhat aggrieved to find that by the time I had finished my explanation Mrs G had wandered off to dimensions unknown.
[Editor's note: it seems increasingly clear that the language of the journal is Earth-centric, suggesting that its publication here was not a spur of the moment decision. While I suppose it is possible, perhaps even likely, that rats have arses elsewhere in the universe, the reference to "gin and tonic" seems too specific to be a coincidence. On the other hand, the universe is a big place ...]
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