Overheard in the restaurant

"I flip off my doctor every time she tells me to stop smoking crack. It's my lungs. It's my brain."

I saw the speaker's face, and I swear she wasn't joking. This is what you have to look forward to after med school, I guess, bluechromis!

More about bodies. Do they ever stop being interesting?

This morning a friend came over for handstands and we did some headstand/handstand work. I found myself way ahead of him on all fronts, which surprised me, because he's a slim, athletic guy who works out and does rock climbing and is in generally good shape. I gave him bunches of pointers on both kinds of h-stand, and he's now obsessed with headstand presses and pikes. Yay! I also got him to spot me and time me on a handstand in the middle of the floor... I went 60 seconds, which is probably pretty good. After that, of course, I went to the gym and did my usual upper-body workout (except I've been working harder on military presses, hoping for some crossover into hspu's) and then tried to do handstands again... ha ha, nope, no straddle-ups left, too tired.

(Speaking of unusual exercise, who's up for some parkour? He was never aware of his environment before, he says. He'd walk somewhere, but register nothing. Now, he's looking, looking at that set of stairs, that handrail ... that table. That part sounds good. And unlike urban exploration, which I'm also interested in, you aren't all that likely to be trespassing when you do it. Hmmmmmm.)

To round out my body-centric day, heisenbug and I walked to the Museum of Science to see Bodyworlds 2, which is mostly a display of real human bodies and body parts that have been preserved by plastination. On almost all of them the skin was removed to show musculature and so forth. It gave me a lot to think about, so I'll just give a few impressions.

• I no longer feel silly for not being able to figure out WHICH small inner-thigh muscle is stiff in my right leg. There are a ton of them in there.
• The right lung has three lobes and the left only has two!?
• There are tendon things that run from the neck, down under the collarbone, and over to attach somewhere in the upper arm. Huh? I saw these several times, but I only think they're tendons (not nerves) because I saw them on the muscles-only display, which also included a lot of tendons.
• jg26 was right, they almost always left the eyebrows on, except the pregnant woman who got big wistful-looking eyelashes instead (instead, not as well). They also had lips, anuses, belly buttons and some of the genital area, and usually eyelids, which I guess you'd expect.
• The first thing to disturb me emotionally was the display of lungs, where they showed normal lungs (lightly speckled), a smoker's lungs (pretty dark) and finally a coal miner's lungs (black). The poor coal miner. Some person actually lived that way. :(
• There was only one body I thought was posed somewhat offensively, in the sense of going a little too far toward using the cadaver as abstract art. I think they did their best to walk that line; I heard someone else mutter "that's a little much" at a different one that did not bother me.
There are two ankle joints, one right on top of the other, both of which bend the foot forward and back! The one bone between them is shaped like a crescent moon. Never knew that.
• I also never knew that little kids have an organ called a thymus that disappears as they grow up; it helps set up the immune system and then, T cells produced, it's done. How strange to learn about this in adulthood, when my thymus has already done its work and departed my chest cavity. Farewell and thank you, thymus!