Hey There, Sports Fans!

So... today the first year anatomy lab started up again after a nice holiday break, and it was down to business: dissection of the face. An area of human anatomy so complicated with muscles, ligaments, arteries, veins and nerves that they put us through 3 weeks of intense lecture before even bothering sending us down to fuck with the cadavers.

It's a gruesome thing, dissecting the face of a 76 year old lung cancer victim who has been decomposing like a slab of raw meat on a stainless steal table for 6 months. Not very much fun at all. Its the smell that really gets you. And its an unsettling thing to see 100 people you previously thought to be completely normal suddenly cutting open peoples faces and obsessively scraping away pounds of subcutaneous fat (which looks alot like mango in both colour and texture) from the cheekbone and scalp. "Who are these people?" I thought to myself, "what kind of twistedly morbid gig have we gotten ourselves into here?" We were violating these dead bodies, that much is certain, but it was all in the name of science.

SCIENCE, our all-knowing and un-holy Master, we bow down to thee, and on thy command, take tiny metal instruments and scrape pounds of fat off of dead bodies for hours per week! Contrary to popular belief, this gruesome ritual holds very little educational value. I learned nothing in the lab that I couldn't have learned from a textbook (besides, of course, what rotting flesh smells like, 6 months in). Anyone who's worked with cadavers before knows exactly what I'm talking about: you can't see shit. And the only reason I got an A on the anatomy lab exam at Xmas was because I'd read the text and knew where things were suppost to be (not that I could see them in the exam!).

But fuck all that...its besides the point. My friend Rob from my first year class is a Man of Science, through and through. So when I asked him if he'd be donating his body to CMCC when he died, I was surprised to hear him say flat out, "No." He felt that it was demeaning and violating and he wasn't about to have some snot-noise 1st year little punk cuttin' him up. "Like you," I said. "Exactly," he said. But athiests believe that when you die, thats it. No heaven, no nothin' and the body is just an empty shell. Which, funnily enough, is exactly what the Klingons from Star Trek believe. They talk about this belief in many episodes: when a Klingon dies they believe that the body is just a worthless, "empty shell" and that the humans can despose of it as they see fit. So I guess thats what we're doing...scientists (in many ways) make good Klingons.

Speaking of my 1st year class, I am beginning to realize that they are not all as square as I previously thought. I say this in response to the numerous rumours of orgys and drug riddled keg parties that have been flying around the school as of late. We sat around thinking about it one night, drinking and smoking pot (we weren't swearing or fornicating, by the way, but once the former gets started, the latter cannot be far behind) and going through the class list, and as far as we can figure it: at most 20% of the class does NOT smoke pot. At first this worried me. Aren't we suppost to be Health Professionals here? And what about all this casual SEX everyone's been having? Can THAT be healthy? Is this school breading a generation of drug addled-sex crazed Health Professionals? Things are NOT looking good for the nation...but maybe I'm overreacting. Yes, I must remember my MOTO: Everything in Moderation, Including Moderation. Are my classmates up to anything that other young health professionals around the country their age arn't? I can tell you right now that they are NOT...and a man named Tim Rees can corroborate my story. So when I'm talking to my patients in the future, and they ask me if my MOTO aplys to Recreational Drugs & Free Love, I will say, "Yes, yes it does." And I think my patients will walk away all the healthier for it...

Yours in Fear & Loathing of George W Bush...
NBL from TO...
Max