A bunch of little things recently have gotten me thinking about bones. All of my (2 or 3) regular readers probably know that I used to be an archaeologist and that my research focus was animal bones. But you might not know why. Of course, you might not care why either, but it’s my blag and I can blag what I want to blag, dammit! (And also I can type “blag” as often as I want to.) (And use lots and lots of parentheses.)<\/p>\n
So, bones. When I was little I wanted to be a doctor. From what I recall it seems like a mostly undifferentiated desire, “doctor” as category. And my dad’s a doctor, so that’s probably a big factor.<\/p>\n
In my later childhood (what the kids these days call tweens<\/a>) this general thinking coalesced into a specific interest in bones, and I decided I was going to be an orthopedic surgeon. I’m not sure when, exactly, this coalescence happened, but it’s likely roundabouts age 10 because in 5th grade I had a friend who had a problem with low calcium levels in her body and thus would break at least one bone every few months or so.<\/p>\n Now, leaving aside for the moment the shudder of horror that typing that sentence produced in me now that I am a grownup and a parent (eek! can you imagine? her poor, poor parents), when I was 10 this scenario was pretty dang cool. She practically always<\/i> had a cast (like Nona Mecklenberg<\/a>!), and kids would want to sign the cast, and I was the shy type so this seemed real neat to me.<\/p>\n So I did what any envious kid would do: I courted potentially bone-breaking accidents. I “fell” down the stairs. I rollerskated fast in the street. Of course none of it worked: I ended up with a few sprained ankles + wrists, that’s it. I did manage to convince my dad to take me for an xray or two, just in case<\/i>.<\/p>\n When I got to high school I became obsessed with being “arty” (and all the mid-80s mope-rock<\/a> that comes with it), and the doctor thing faded into the background. But it’s funny to think that I came back to bones later. Even now when we go to the AMNH<\/a> and see the animal skeletons I have a hard time restraining myself from naming the different bones to Gus. Luckily he’s too young to blow me off quite yet.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A bunch of little things recently have gotten me thinking about bones. All of my (2 or 3) regular readers probably know that I used to be an archaeologist and that my research focus was animal bones. But you might not know why. Of course, you might not care why either, but it’s my blag […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-167","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mauraweb.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/167","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mauraweb.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mauraweb.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mauraweb.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mauraweb.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=167"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mauraweb.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/167\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mauraweb.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=167"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mauraweb.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=167"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mauraweb.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=167"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}