life: spam on wry

I received an intriguing spam message in my work e-mail a month or two ago, so much so that it has hung out there all this time as I've periodically contemplated it. Never even looked at the content of the message, but someone named "dejuan monica" sent me a message with the subject line:

life, n.: a whim of several billion cells to be you for a while.

I'd never seen that quote before, though if you google it it turns out to be fairly not uncommon. Leaving aside that it's several orders of magnitude too low an estimate (unless, I suppose, it's just contemplating the cells in the brain, not the body), I found the idea profound, even though I couldn't immediately put my finger on why.

Then last night I was thinking about it again, and the punchline hit me. I'd like to ask several billion cells, "what in the HELL were you THINKING?!"