All the perfumes of Arabia

Held a human brain in my hand this afternoon. Despite gloves, I still smell like formaldehyde. The chemical preserves my memory of holding a few pounds that used to be memory. How beautiful odd our anatomy is. Eyes wide, hands found the optic chiasmus, traced central sulcus, raced over motor cortex, sifted across cerebellar folds. I thought, I am touching the surface of someone's sometime mind. Dead and donated to Science, or a college classroom. Poor Yorick. I saw synapses that used to be his personality. And couldn't get over gap between brain and mind. Mind inert is just matter. Grey matter trailing a low ponytail of spinal cord. It dangled down an invisible back and terminated in the cauda equinae, a fringe of strands like a wet horse's tail. Peeling apart the two hemispheres I looked in at the corpus callosum, the connection unifying this stranger’s brain, and marveled. What a piece of work is man.

Because it almost relates to the above, the brain, and also to the below, bathroom humor, cannot help but tell what happened to a friend yesterday. While exiting a toilet stall on the fourth floor in Stiles, the top hinges of the door broke free. It swung down, hitting her in the head with a mild concussion. There's only a slight bruise. Terrible but when going to the bathroom leads to head trauma, it's more than I can bear to keep a straight face. (Don't worry, she's ok.)