Bringing the pasture to the suburbs

So perhaps you've noticed that Facebook has this thing now where in the upper right corner of the page it puts four thumbnails from two albums of one of your friends.

Well I often click on those thumbnails.

And then I comment on photos from three years ago with people in them whom, some of them, I haven't seen in more than ten years.

But that's how I roll.

Well, I was just looking at my friend Amy's pictures from her high school days (she just finished her junior year of college. I didn't go to high school with her. But I'm single, this town is deserted, and I'm to a certain degree ill, so yes I spent part of my Saturday night looking at pictures of Amy's high school biology class.).

Anyway, there are pictures on there of a cow lung, and they reminded me of some of my former classroom escapades with cow parts.

In my seventh grade science class we looked at a cow heart, I believe. However it might have been a lung.

Well I used to have quite an interest in cows (I still believe they're beautiful animals, brown bodies against landscape backgrounds; particularly jersey cows--gorgeous), and collected several stuffed cows.* Mostly they just provided a black and white decor to my middle school bedroom, but they also came in handy when my brothers and I performed our 1996 interpretation of the Nativity for our parents, in which a lot of Holsteins came to visit the stable that was our foyer.

I also made these things--yes, there was more than one--called "Cow scrapbooks," in which I adhered catalog pictures of cow figurines, Got milk? ads, and Far Side cartoons depicting bovines to construction paper with rubber cement. I then hole punched them, numbered the pages, and placed them in binders.

I would spend hours doing this (I had friends. I believe it was my quirkiness that drew people to me. Or else they were just curious about my strange habits).

I still have them.

Anyway. My seventh grade science teacher took note of my...interest...and let me assist her with the cow heart. Or lung. Whatever it was. I had someone document the moment photographically. Just like Amy. :)

Then down the road to college, during my second-to-last semester I was taking a psychology class called "Sensation and Perception." AWEsome class, taught by a man who would soon be deemed my all-time favorite professor (who I saw last week at Ri Fri's graduation, but that's beside the point). The class was very biology based; we learned fascinating things about gaining sight after blindness, musk's effect on men vs. women, umami (not to be confused with unagi).

Well I was also in the lab portion of that class, and one night during the lecture portion Dr. Rowland mentioned that we were going to be dissecting cow eyes later during lab.

I thought he was being sarcastic.

He wasn't. We really dissected cow eyes that night. But I didn't actually believe him until he brought them out with the scalpels.

And then I learned about the optic nerve and the aqueous humor.

*Sometime during or after college I got rid of the majority of them, and I recall hugging them all, one giant mass shoved in a cardboard box.