Germs piss me off.
I mean, what use are they? Oh sure, maybe they help us digest our food, and maybe we were all germs once, but for the most part, they're mainly an annoyance. I've been sick for the last three weeks and I am thoroughly annoyed.
It all started with a nice viral head cold which sucked, but promised to go away in a few days. THEN a bunch of stupid bacteria jumped on the wagon and turned it from a head cold to a throat and chest infection. Hell, it even moved up into my eyeballs and gave me a taste of conjunctivitis. That little gift from our prokariotic friends made me spend two hours in the emergency room after my mom put the fear of God into me by telling me here conjuntivitis horror stories (she said the whites of her eyes looked like HAMBURGER! Gross!).
Stupid germs.
In spite of my extreme distaste for them, you can't help but admire monocellular creatures a LITTLE bit: the rugged individualism, their pervasiveness, their ability to procreate with out all that messy relationship crap. Us? We're all communists. Every cell in our bodies has been pigeonholed into a very narrow job description and lives only to serve the whole. Cells live and die according to their function and what the body requires of them. White cells selflessly throw tehmselves into the deperate melee of an infection. Skin cells put their very bodies between us and the outside world, dying with depressing regularity, and making room for those behind them to continue the cycle. Sperm cells surge by the millions, searching for a target smaller than a pinhead until they die, not even caring if they're trapped inside a latex prison. Eye cells only see, muscle cells only contract, spit gland cells make spit, and red blood cells really don't do anything but go with the flow. Only when a cell goes cancerous and flies into a suicidal rebellion against the whole do our cells show ANY initiative at all.
A bacterium wouldn't stand for that. Bacteria do whatever the hell they feel like, ALL the time. Amoeba and paramecium are even cooler, though, because..well...eukariots just kick ass. On top of that, they usually leave us alone. There's nothing more facinating than watching an amoeba glide through a petri dish and engulf an unsuspecting bacterium. Paramecium are more like bumper cars, but they're still pretty cool, if only for comic relief.
Boy, I remember A LOT from my high school biology classes.
And then there are viruses, those little creepy things who's sole purpose is to hijack our cells and use them to create more viruses. At least bacteria CAN be useful, by digesting our food, making insulin, or giving us an excuse to throw out those leftover that we didn't like anyway. Viruses just plain SUCK.
WHOA! I just thought of something--When your body absorbs nutrients through your intestinal walls, it's absorbing BACTERIA SHIT! Or bodies live on the raw sewage of a colony of bacteria! Kind of puts it all in perspective, doesn't it?
Anyway, viruses suck. They're not even ALIVE. They don't eat, they don't move, they can't even screw. The just sit there, waiting for a cell they can invade to come within reach. Then they slide in, kick out the productive DNA and slide their own in its place, turning an otherwise normal cell into a virus factory. Not completely unlike politics, is it? What's even worse, they don't respond to antibiotics. Yep, viruses piss me off more than bacteria, but it's really all relative.
As this well organized presentation proves, monocellular organisms remain a tremendous pain in the ass. They make us miserable, they kill us, they eat our food, and they STINK.
They're almost as bad as multicellular creatures.