2012-08-02
Explanation
This comic explores the unsettling experience of closely examining your own hands. A character sitting outside tells a friend that sometimes they feel intellectually transcendent, like they have moved to a world of pure understanding and beautiful abstraction. Then they say "I do this" and make a circle with their thumb and finger, examining it closely. The other person says "I don'''t get it."
The character then explains the specific perceptual paradox: the length from thumbtip to fingertip has to be roughly the circumference of the finger circle, but it just looks too big. They are distressed that they cannot make it "not look too big." This spirals into an existential crisis: "If I can'''t comprehend my own fingers, how can I comprehend my own mind? Or someone else'''s? Or anything?!" The joke then escalates further when the friend casually mentions that there are actually no muscles in your fingers (which is true -- fingers are controlled by tendons connected to muscles in the forearm and palm), causing the character to scream in horror.
The humor is about how simple, everyday observations about your own body can trigger disproportionate existential dread. The comic takes the common experience of staring at your hand until it starts to look strange and alien, and pushes it to its absurd philosophical conclusion. The votey panel reads "Oh God don'''t email me! I said '''roughly'''!" -- the author preemptively defending the anatomical claim about finger circle circumference from pedantic readers who might write in with corrections.