Return of the culture shock

When we last left our heroine, I had experienced mild culture shock because bird songs (the everyday background wild creature noise you hear and don't pay much attention to) was different.... both because the birds are different species and because the birds that are the same species speak with an accent here.

Well, culture shock has returned. Specifically, I finally figured out that the hip, postmodernist Gen-X ironic sensibility that plays great in the Silicon Valley gets blank stares here.

Example: In the Silicon Valley, I can say, "Oh yeah, I'm a Gen X slacker-- suuuuure," and roll my eyes at my GenX co-worker as we return to our sixty-hour-a-week software jobs. The ironic humor there is clear. My co-worker gets it, and thinks I'm funny. Here, though, I get met with blank stares. Phrases like "Real soon now," (Translation: Never) and "It's a feature" (Translation: It's a software bug) and "We believe in work-life balance" (Translation: Eighty hours a week for months, followed by three days of comp time) have no equivalents.

It could be the geography (West coast Vs. East coast). It could be the degree of urbanization. It could be the generation (I'm mostly dealing with twenty-somethings). It could be that my profession has helping others as its primary aim. I don't really know yet.

Apres moi, le deluge of flying cadaver bits

**** Warning: Gross! Cadaver Gross and Girly Bodypart Gross! Warned ya!*****



Now that I have your collective attention.....

Today, we resumed working on the cadaver. My lab mate (of 105 pound gardenia-and-lily-scented-locust fame) and I, in the women's locker room, decided that the slacker member of our team (who generally finds all sorts of excuses to excuse himself from working on the cadaver) got to cleanup the _inside of the cadaver_. (Recall that this project involved a cut rectum and a generous serving of poop. Think of it as an internal diaper change.)

He didn't wanna do that. Nor did the other guy member of our team, who can generally be induced to hold things and will occasionally cut. We made them deal with it. For once, I stood about five feet away, well out of splatter range.

So then, once the whole mess was cleaned up, we came to it. Our new and revised marching orders were to take the skin and fascia off the legs, then label the muscles individually and label the skin (so you could see, marked on the skin, where the muscles were under it.)

Well, those of you who are anatomy-savvy will realize that the adductor muscles (groin, Mom) go all the way up along the underside of the pelvis to the pubic symphysis. That means... yeah, you guessed it... we had to remove the genitals to get to the muscles underneath them.

I am so not ever doing that. No way. (I've gotten pretty used to seeing the cadaver as a lump of clay that the soul who used to live in it doesn't need anymore. But I'm sorry, I still can't cut the genitals off it. I could do it for a guy cadaver. Not for a woman.)

One of the guys removed them. They wanted to throw the genitals in our specially marked, numbered trash can. (Each cadaver has one. The remains we remove are kept in their own trash can and eventually returned to the family.) Nope, I said. I hate to say it, but I'll bet the teacher wants to keep them for study purposes.

I was right. I shudder to think about our next exam.

Now for the gross ignorance part. Now that the lower abdominal cavity was completely cleaned out, we used a probe to discover where the vagina emerged (you'd think this would be obvious, but actually it was not). And my lab mate had to carefully match the cut-off part of the genitals with the remaining flesh, to see what part was what.

Think about it: She had never seen one of those before. It suddenly became crystal clear to me that _Our Bodies, Ourselves_ is not required reading in this part of the country, and I'll bet that most of my classmates have not done the get-in-the-shower-and-piss-on-a-mirror ritual that would teach them this.