oh, dear heavens, please rescue me from my boredom & from my antsy solitude & from my skin hunger which has started to feel like the itch that comes with the healing of a wide shallow wound to the skin, like a tattoo.
all day i've just been sitting around half-watching "law & order," taking little catnaps, reading. i have now moved on to stiff (warning: i have only two other books left unpacked, unread, to last me until this weekend. help); i read the chapter on the decay lab at UT while eating dinner.
sometimes i wonder why my brain was set up with these weird trip wires, set off at the slightest thing, a picture hung askew; the somehow-&-unexplainably-wrong coincidence of the edge of a bed & the edge of a window frame all the way across the room; the uncardinal direction a pedestrian may be facing while waiting for the light to change � & why at the same time i can sit around eating leftover, room-temperature gooey noodles while reading about bloat & putrescence. i wonder but more than wondering i give in to bragging about it, even just to myself.
i want so badly to be a good anatomy student. just think: it is all my favorite things. bravely looking at the offputting; surface & structure; not talking to people; best of all, the naming of every minute piece & process.
(suddenly i wonder if my skin will be harvestable upon my death, marked-up as it is. secretly i want to be a skeleton in someone's classroom. my parents want to be cremated & their ashes to be scattered in the lake by their cabin. i asked my dad, "wouldn't you rather go someplace you never got a chance to go?" but he said, "no, i'd be uncomfortable, thinking, 'what is this place?'")
the thought of the cat dissection makes me sad, especially when i consider my love for my own cats & my metacognizant awareness of my tendency toward dissociation & inappropriate affect. i've been going over & over the arguments in my head, should i or shouldn't i, what would saint francis do, etc., & i've concluded that i will do the cat when asked to. look at me in my postformal-thought glory. be proud, piaget, kohlberg: i realize there are no moral absolutes.
besides, when i was agonizing out loud over this very thing with my mother, who generally takes my brother-sun-sister-moon-ish impulses with rather more grains of salt than her tie-dyed past would lead you to presume, she told me this story about the oral surgeon (who had both his MD & his DDS) in whose office she worked while i was a wee preverbal creature. one monday he came in & told everyone that over the weekend he had been at a colleague's house & a cat, resting in the warm engine of a parked car, had been ripped up when the car was started. the two men gathered the cat & its missing-bits up, got out their undergraduate cat-anatomy books out, & set to reconstructing it. "& the cat lived!" my mother said, turning to look meaningfully at me. "so don't feel bad about the dead cat. maybe someday you will be called upon to rebuild a kitty."
the thing is, i like to name things. the thing is, i let myself get all fascinated by bones.
