Wednesday 21 March 2012

If I'm a Muppet then I'm a very manly Muppet.

I dissected my first frog in the seventh grade. But I wasn't just handed a scalpel and a dead frog, oh no. First I had to reconstruct a paper frog, putting all of its various organs in their proper places. To prove my worth. So reconstruct I did, in three dimensions.

7th grade science homework

This is not, in fact, the oldest thing I own. Though I do have some of my mother's and grandmother's jewelry, a James Dickey first edition that I never had a chance to give away, an ancient photo or two, I generally fall in the the Things-You-Own-Own-You Camp. But nothing else remains of my childhood except for this frog. This piece of cardstock marks the very beginning of my origin story; they day I jerry-rigged pop-up frog guts was the day I veered off the well worn path of my peers. It was the day I realized that I am a really, really weird human being.

5 comments:

Jennie said...

Did you ever have to dissect a live frog? We didn't HAVE to but we had to watch if we didn't dissect. That shit freaked me out.

Unknown said...

Frog's Legs, gross!

eclectic said...

I'm with you, Jennie. They made us pith the brain first, which I refused to do, then spent the entire lab period crying silently on my lab stool, trying not to watch while appearing to watch so I could still get a good grade. Ugh!

And Kat, if by "weird" you mean "awesome", then yeah, you totally are.

kat said...

I didn't even know live dissection was a thing! Clearly my pre-med studies ended far too early.

Kiti said...

My mom has an old picture of me, tiny and pig-tailed at age 3, dissecting a worm on the porch. That was my moment, and I'm sure my loving mom just resigned herself to having a strange daughter, since she's always been very supportive of my interest in science. Since then, I've dissected countless organisms, including more worms (some of them, yes, alive), arthropods, and vertebrates of all kinds (fish, lots of frogs, and humans, to name a few). I kind of feel like dissecting something right now.