This way to the stars

The short happy life of The Frog (aka Rana pipiens)

For clarification, italicized parts are in the point of view of the frog while non-italicized parts are in our point of view (the students who were dissecting it). Thanks very much. :)

It was horrible. It was bad enough that my whole identity - and those of others like me - were crammed into two unpronounceable tongue-twisting "scientific names" (and take note, my tongue doesn't twist easily because it's attached on the posterior end). They just had to kill me and subject me two four whole weeks of torture and humiliation. Even in death, my body was preserved, limbs and face contorted as if killing me had caused the ultimate pain...which it had.

It was disgusting. It was bad enough that we didn't get to dissect animals per phylum so that our Zoology Lab sessions would be in sync with our Zoo Lec sessions. Our lab teacher had to be THAT mediocre to subject us to a whole month of dissecting just frogs. Such boredom; it would have been much more exciting to dissect leeches, molluscs, earthworms... Pity we didn't work on live frogs - now THAT would have been much more fun. Although, when we picked up the dead frogs, we did kinda feel sorry for them, especially with their body contorted in that awful way. But oh well, it was in the name of science. So we picked up our frogs, dutifully removing first the skin, then the muscles, then the organs...week after week after week, until all that's left were the bones. The frog was icky and slimy and yucky and messy and made us smell like formalin afterwards. Finally, we lost all our pity for the hapless frog, because the twisted position of its limbs made it much harder to scrape off their muscles...

I was dead; I couldn't feel anything more no matter how hard they pricked and poked at me. But couldn't THEY feel anything for me, not even pity that my death was all for the purpose of a grade in their 5 x 8 index cards? Why couldn't I have just decomposed in the soil or water like some decent frog? For four weeks I had been subject to the utmost indignity as they gradually stripped my body off its every system. I was made to feel even more little when they poked at me with that sharp metal thing, identifying every single part of me with more of those unpronounceable names. If I were alive then, I'd certainly have jumped out of that filthy and vile-smelling dissecting pan without further adieu. Gastrocnemius? Pectoral girdle? Latissimus dorsi? Do those terms encompass how I've lived and grown up?

Gastrocnemius. Pectoral girdle. Latissimus dorsi. I'm really hating the stupid frog right now. We had to memorize loads and loads of terms to identify every single facet of its body for the practical exams, which were given in the same period as the dissection. Imagine memorizing over twently unintelligible Latin-sounding terms in thirty minutes - what a mind job.

Test subject. I was a freakin' test subject. How humiliating...

Lab test. We have a freakin' lab test on Thursday about the frog. How useless...

What did I ever do to deserve this sterile and academic death? I looked from above as they scraped at my bones, put colorful pins on my preserved muscles, and threw my organs down the trash...

Oh well. It was all in the name of science, right? Oh, and I think we have to do a homework about it, a color-coded chart on 5 x 8 index cards identifying the axial and appendicular bones in the skeletal system of our Rana pipiens specimen (damn I broke the pectoral girdle).

posted by steph @ 6:31 PM