Someone here is about to attempt one of the most energetically expensive projects in the known universe, and everyone is focused on the cake.
Consider what is actually underway inside the guest of honor. To assemble a single new human from raw ingredients, a body must take ordinary food, glucose and amino acids, and against the relentless pull of entropy arrange roughly seven octillion atoms into a working, self-repairing structure. That is a seven followed by twenty-seven zeros.
Each of those atoms is older than the planet. The calcium being laid down into a tiny femur right now was forged in the core of a dying star and flung across the galaxy in an explosion, drifted for billions of years, and is presently being organized into a leg by a process no engineer can replicate.
The gifts stacked on the table are, physically speaking, deeply strange offerings for this occasion. Fabric. Sugar. A plastic device that plays a tune. Meanwhile the real machinery hums along unremarked: a placenta running a chemical exchange more delicate than any refinery, a heart the size of a walnut already pumping, having started beating before anyone in this room knew it existed.
They keep asking her how she feels. She says tired. Of course she is tired. She is doing thermodynamic work that would cost a city block of factory equipment to approximate, powered entirely by crackers.
And here is the fact that stops me cold every time. Every person in this room, laughing over paper plates, was once this same improbable act of assembly, briefly winning a fight against disorder that the whole universe is otherwise, patiently, certain to lose.