» Have you ever seen a dead body?

closer than I'd have liked...
Woo, actually a QotW I have a good story for!! I had to go out of lurkerdom just to post it. It's a bit long, but trust me, it gets better at the end...

Long ago, when I was on my first year at uni, I had Human Anatomy classes, and not the practical ones we would all have liked to have, but the yucky ones that involved doing dissections and spending far too much time in the dissection room.

So, first day, everybody going 'ugh' in their minds before they even see the body, telling the others how revolting they think it is going to be, trying to sneak peeks into the dissection room... typical firstie behaviour, just to finally see a body that doesn't look like a real body, more like a brown plastic version of it after being in formol for years and years. All very anticlimactic, and we all leave the room feeling very proud of ourselves.

Next day, the teacher, who is a lazy sod, asks for volunteers to help him with the dissection, and I, feeling quite unflappable, raise my hand. Ten minutes after that, I'm on first row looking as he starts cutting the skin and the first layer of muscles and feeling not so unflappable after all. Green and a little bit dizzy, that's more like it. But I've volunteered, I don't really know the teacher or the rest of the volunteers and I'm not going to lose face in front of them. So I try to look at a point just above where I should be really paying attention at, and hope no one notices. All goes well and I manage not to get worse, but not better either, until the moment the teacher asks me to help him hold something. I look down and... promptly faint in front of everybody.

Next thing I know, I'm on the floor and open my eyes to blurrily see someone giving me air, and hear people whispering excitedly. I ask for my glasses, as I'm still seeing a bit hazy. Sudden silence. 'You've them on', says someone. I lift my hand to my face and put them off to look at them. They are smeared with something whitish and oily. Horrified, I touch my face. Same thing. Put one and one together and faint again. Guess where I had fallen face on?

Afterwards I got used to it, did a lot of dissections, got a few laughs out of the situation and my mates soon stopped shouting 'Close your eyes, there is a dead body!' every time we entered the bloody room, the wankers. And also got really good marks on that subject (out of the teacher's guilt that he wasn't able to stop me in time, I've always thought, because I was pants at it), so all in all it wasn’t so traumatic at the end (but I’m grateful not to remember the falling part)
(Tue 4th Mar 2008, 22:29, More)

» Kids

'See? No Spiderman!'
My father, who obviously won't be left with any little grandchildren after this, decided to start telling to my little cousin, who was three years old then, that his greatest hero at the time, Spiderman, was a sissy and so would he be if he kept wearing his favourite underwear (featuring Spiderman, of course). All the family laughed seeing how the little boy became all angry. Kept doing so for the next two years, until my cousin (who's five now) had a trauma so ingrained that he doesn't only refuses to wear spiderman underwear but needs to prove it to any of us everytime he sees us, removing his trousers and running at full speed towards us shouting: 'See? No Spiderman!' Makes for interesting conversation when it happens on the street, that's for sure, and my aunt has banned Spiderman jokes from now on...
(Thu 17th Apr 2008, 20:36, More)