Word: lamped
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...phototherapy lamp is another word for a robot that plugs into an outlet and shines very bright, white light on you. When it shines on a person with seasonally mediated anxiety, depression, and lack of motivation, science and magic converge to make those feelings go away (phototherapy lamps fit into the category of phenomena that scientists know for sure work but don’t know for sure why—like dark matter, which, despite its name, has little to do with my condition...
...nose because her eyes just weren’t strong enough? Cyborg. The woman who booked my appointment, using a telephone to talk to me instead of just yelling across campus to try to reach me? Cyborg. I confess that I felt some Asimov-flavored robot anxiety (something Lamp doesn’t treat) when I started to wonder where machine ends and the person begins...
...Meanwhile, I’ve had a lot of difficulty adapting to my new identity. This situation has raised many questions—for example, if I only use Lamp in the morning, but its effects last all day, how long am I a cyborg? How do I explain my new situation to my friends and family? What does it mean about the relationship between humans and our helpful robots that I felt the need to name Lamp...
...moving violation in a vehicle if they were not a human, but a cyborg, when they committed the infraction? Can the car be blamed? I think a dog can probably be a cyborg, too, but can a plant? Or does it require some sort of conscious autonomy? Where does Lamp fit into all of this? If we get the fuel that runs our robots from oil, which comes from dead dinosaurs, can they truly be distinguished from organic material? Also, is there...
...cyborgs everywhere I look. Some are young, some old. Some are cyborgs by choice—when listening to an iPod, when typing a term paper, when masturbating with a vibrator—but others, like me, are medical cyborgs. Some have pacemakers; I have Lamp. Although we may have a few more metaphysical dilemmas to grapple with than the rest of you, ultimately we just want to be accepted, and treated the same as everyone else. Even though we have parts that will probably outlive you, and might take over the world someday...