that's macerating.

i have officially been a vegetarian since i was 8 years old. i say officially because i'd always hated eating meat, i just wasn't autonomous enough to stop having silent standoffs with my dad over in 'n out burgers until i was in third grade. i also stopped consuming milk, eggs and cheese around the same time, and cultivated a really impressive, robust lie about my lactose-intolerance, which explained why i pulled the cheese off of pizza slices in bowling alleys at birthday parties.

as a kid, i didn't like the taste or texture of most animal products and that's why i hated eating them. i have never claimed to have been so worldly at 7 that it was the eating of animals themselves that skeeved me out (however, as an adult i can say that it was the "muscle-y" texture of meat that was gross, so maybe the animals-as-food issue was subconscious but there nevertheless). that being said, having read many, many books about vegetarianism and the factory farms of today, i can say that i'm very proud of my decision to stop eating meat, regardless of how i came to make it.

so, having been a life-long animal lover and hider of fish sticks (almost always halfway in the kitchen trash, so that no one would be the wiser), i have recently had to make a few sad choices. i'm currently a first-year in a forensic anthropology program, because in college and at the tar pits, i fell in love with the idea of building up the stories of people long dead from what they leave behind (namely, their bones). it's like my own personal religion. it's comforting to know that even if you've been dead for thousands of years, if someone so chooses, they can figure out really detailed facts about your life, such as if you were right or left handed or what foods you ate as you were growing up. afterlife or not, your story never really disappears on earth, and i like that very much.

the sad choices: macerating animals. meaning: helping remove the flesh so that the bones can be cleaned and catalogued and used for comparison, etc. yesterday, i helped* macerate a rabbit, which was both absolutely horrifying and legitimately not as disgusting as one might think it would be, which i realize is a complete contradiction. explanation: it probably wasn't more foul than anything someone might make for dinner - tonight, even. however, for me, as someone who get teary eyed walking by all the animal parts in the meat section of the grocery store, it carried with it a lot of intensity.

i'm not planning on making the deconstruction of animal bodies a hobby. however, i'm glad i did it, simply because i'm gonna see a lot of really upsetting things in the next three years and i'm celebrating any little step to getting over my shock and awe.

*by "helped" i mean that i used a scalpel for approximately six minutes, after which i figured i'd had enough of the "experience" and was done.