Gail's Guide to Dissecting Zombie Waffles

I'm still busy this week doing some freelance technical writing.

As a sop to all ten of my dedicated readers, I'm stealing something I just posted on facebook and putting it up in this space. 

Gail: [Once again dissecting waffles] This, class, is a waffle hand. Note the thumb and three fingers. Now, here's an interesting feature of a waffle. The second and third digits share a tendon. Let's cut a transversal here...[gasp] what's that?
Eric: Syrup?
Gail: It's waffle blood! Do you know what that means?
Eric: It's still alive?
Gail: It's a ZOMBIE HAND!!! Aaaaargh! [Gail's own hand goes rogue and starts trying to attack Eric's brain.]
Eric: [Calmly fending off his crazy mom] Actually, that doesn't necessarily mean it is still alive, just that maybe the waffle didn't completely bleed out.
Gail: [Appalled] Son, you are a sick, sick person. How can you say "maybe the waffle didn't completely bleed out" so calmly? [She proceeds to show how pulling on the "tendon" wiggles both "fingers" at once.]


For an encore, I portrayed a bumbling T.A. 

First she couldn't identify what she was dissecting, and yelled at the class for not doing their anatomy reading when they couldn't help her. 

Then she declared it to be a kneecap and yelled at the class again for asking if it was a left or right knee cap. 

Then she used a scalpel to start slicing into the structure, only to discover that scalpels (table knives) are good at soft tissue but not bone. She grabbed a honkin' butcher knife and broke open the knee with a big "CRACK!"

The waffle started twitching and laughing. The class worried that there was still nerve activity. "That just means it's fantastically fresh!" she assured them.

No, the bigger problem was that the laughing reaction meant she'd hit the "funny bone," which further meant that she was actually dissecting an elbow. How embarrassing!

That counts as "science" for the day, right? Right?

Okay, it also demonstrates the following:

1) My original idea of encouraging waffle cutting independence has backfired. Several months ago, in one of those fits of glorious inspiration that come back to haunt me like a ghost (or stalk me like the obsessed Undead), I agreed to cut up waffles only if I could turn it into an anatomy lesson. Boys. I forgot that I have BOYS. They grimaced and shouted "Ewwww!" and covered their ears...and then begged for more. Sigh.

2) Pursuing almost pure technical writing for a month is having strange effects on me. Like my German which works precisely 50% of the time, I'm having a bad reaction to the soulless part of pontificating procedures. I jotted down a grocery list for Jon last week and I couldn't make it funny or creative to save my life. I just stared at it gloomily and finally handed it over, a prosaic and depressingly dry husk of pure information. Ugh.

The other half of the time, I'm super-over-compensating. As demonstrated above.

There's only so long I can stand to write pages of documentation like this: "The exact answer to this problem was 1330. Any integer within +/- 5% of that number receives credit. In this case, any answer between 1264 and 1396, inclusive, would count."
 
Balance. I need more balance...

Aha! Another week of technical writing should turn me into a zombie. At that point, I would either become interesting, or I would no longer care.

Or--even better!--when this is over, I will write a lengthy, dessicated document about how to dissect zombie waffles. Perfect!

But for now, back to work.