martyfartywarty

Measure the distance from your shoulder to your fingertips, and then divide it by the distance from your elbow to your fingertips. PHI again. Another? Hip to floor divided by knee to floor. PHI again. Finger joints. Toes. Spinal divisions. PHI. PHI. PHI. ~ Dan Brown in The Da Vinci Code

I had a bad day when I went home after work on one of the past days. The bus driver was slow, the traffic jam was horrible. All in all was caused by my chit-chatty mouth. I talked too long to a friend whom I haven’t met for a while.

My place was a bit far from the city, so I had to catch 2 buses to get home. First bus was a public one and the second was a private. I was late for 7 minutes and the bus only came every 30 minutes. I got books but it wasn’t a comfy place to read (no seat, and it was wet because it was pouring before then) *slump*.

So then 3 minutes later at 6.10 pm, I decided to walk home with a prediction that I will reach home around 6.30, but at the end I arrived home at 6.45. It took the same amount of time if I had waited for the ride instead. Why did the journey that usually took me about 20 minutes became 45 minutes? Because I carry a fair amount of weights… My handbag weighed 2.5 kg and my other bag with laptop in it was 8 kg. If you are wondering why I was carrying such heavy bags, you can glare at squirtle (my laptop). He was cute but heavy nonetheless :S

Carrying bags weighing about a quarter of my body weight wasn’t extremely easy and it costed me sore arms and shoulders the next day. I first put the heaviest one on my left shoulder, kept moving and changing its position constantly. I lasted 15 minutes till I finally gave up. I switched it to my right shoulder and voila! I didn’t feel any uneasiness, and I didn’t have to change the position of the bag even once after that. It was a weird joy like when you just recover from runny nose, things are superbly normal - I felt I could walk the same as if I only carry a small bag. My right shoulder was hell lot stronger than my left’s.

I have a lot of asymmetric body parts: non-existence right eyelid, smaller left foot, lenkier left fingers, not to mention differences caused by my right-handedness. My right fingers were that stubby that any ring on them would look ugly, thank God the left one appeared more normal. It was very hard to put eyeliner on my right eye. Leaving it on only the left eye just made me look like panda. My left foot made me never able to wear any strapless shoes - if the right one fitted, the left one would be loose, left fitted, right too tight. Damn, life was full of disappointments.

My effort to balance my right eyelid stopped after a few painful days of wearing home-made shaped sticky tapes to construct the line as similar to my left one. My high school computing teacher would ponder on my unusual glittery eyelid everytime he saw it. Back in Indo, I would have to boil kettle for hot shower, so I would use my left arm muscles in order to make it stronger. Didn’t really have any effect though. I would try to write or catch balls using my left hand but in things like juggling, I still have a lot of issues trying to coordinate my weaker limbs.

Dan Brown’s introduced 1.618 as a divine proportion in his most famous book: The Da Vinci Code. He claimed that divine proportion, or phi (its mathematical notation) governs some of the basic ratio in human body such as elbow-to-arm, thigh-to-leg ratio, and more of others . Despite all the critiques of this suggested ‘fact’, it is easier to accept that God might have some kind of blueprint when He/She/it created humans at the beginning. But the truth doesn’t seem to be the case. Each person is different, each person is unique. Asymmetrical body parts are also another one of human characteristics. I eventually realised that there is not much point to alter any parts of my body just for appearance *doh*.

The question remains though: for the health purposes, should I use more of my stronger limbs because they do the job better or should I bother training my weaker parts to have better balanced posture and body?

Look at all parts of your body now and you may notice new special features if you haven’t done so yourself.