Catherine J. Gardner's post today, on her blog The Poisoned Apple, had to do with finding old diaries and reminiscing about the entries. Particularly the ones regarding writing endevours. I commented that I had not kept one and it was just as well as there was pretty much nothing to report between the ages of 12 and 20. I suggested that for an interesting read we could crack open one of my old university chemistry lab books...much more entertaining to be sure. The whole science thing got my thought process on a tangent.
I flashed back to public school where we had to take a chicken and boil it in a pot until all of the meat and skin could be taken off (this nasty task, of course, fell upon my mum). We then had to take apart the bones, dry them, and rebuild the bird in some sort of a striking pose. On another occasion, high school I think, we had to discect a cow's eye. I recall the teacher bringing the plastic pail of eyes into the class, the orbs all packed in crushed ice and staring up at us with an accusatory stare. The final nasty flashback is of biology class in university when we had to disect a frog. I had been out all night drinking with friends and got about 1 hour of sleep prior to the 3 hour lab session. I desided then and there the mutilation of wee beasts was not for me. Myself and another burly young man defered the scalpel weilding to the woman of our threesome...which leads to the conslusion that this sort of business is best handled by the fairer sex...or was it: don't mess aroung with a woman holding a blade. You get the picture!
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4 comments:
I never kept a writing diary, but I recently dug out the ideas notebooks I kept back from when I was around 18-21 year old. So they're over twenty years old and mostly written in badly faded pencil. I'm intending to transcribe the better (such an appropriate word to use, when "good" just doesn't qualify) ones into my ideas file. Yeah, I'll pretty much do anything to avoid actual writing.
At random:
"Guy kills death and has to take over his job" - I swear on anything you like, this pre-dates me reading Pratchett's Mort, or seeing Family Guy or The Simpsons. Back then it was a hot idea, now it's worthless.
"Centuries old dragon gets resurrected but can't move because a tree had grown up through its bones, anchoring it down" So not just a dragon story, but a stationary dragon story. How come that genre never took off?
"If you had a bunker filled with tinned food and flies, in a million years time would the flies have evolved tin openers?" You know, maybe I'll skip transcribing these.
Ooh, that chicken experiment sounds nasty. I remember having to dissect bulls eyes once - or rather I remember objecting to it and being sent to the back of the class.
We did bull's eyes at my primary school when I was 11. I don't think it was even on the curriculum, I think the teacher just got a kick from freaking us out. The concept of objecting to what the teacher told us to do hadn't filtered over to our particular island back then.
Right, Anton. I'm sure the high school kids of today would tell the teacher where to stick the bull's eye...and keep transcribing those entries. Perhaps you should edit a lot and turn it into a SF comedy.
Cate: Were you the civil disobedient one in the class who protested everything (or just the gory stuff)?
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