Gross and Educational

My husband and i decided to have a picnic with our some of our friends recently, well, not quite a picnic. If you can call sitting at a picnic table drinking really great beer while the kids ran around the park, a picnic, than we totally had one. Anyway, one of the wives brought up, that she had bought some really wonderful local honey and keep going on and on about it. I kinda got excited because you know what? I have a really rad story about honey...

We all know that honey tastes great and may or may not have some "healing properties" in it. But in twelfth-century Arabia they took honey to an extreme. They had this thing called mellified man, which was dead human remains steeped in honey and yes you rubbed it on your body and also took it orally as medicine. Can you imagine? They would get a 70 or 80 year old man who was willing to give his body to help others and make him only eat honey and after a month of only eating honey his urine and feces were entirely honey and then he would die. After death they would place his body in a honey filled coffin and wait a 100 years. After 100 years the body was worthy of healing ailments.

I told this story because it was relevant to what we were talking about at our picnic and its such a cool story, everyone was disgusted. LOL. This may or may not be one of the reasons i have no real friends. This is the kind of stuff i like to read about, learn about and than talk about. My husband hates this and gives me enormous amounts of shit for reading books that are gross, funny, and strange in his eyes. All the stuff i find interesting he finds incredibly raunchy. The way i look at it, the raunchier and if you can throw sleazy in there, the better.

One of my favorite books is called Stiff: The Curious lives of human cadavers by Mary Roach. That's where that honey story came from. Actually anything from Mary Roach, she also wrote one called Bonk which is about sex and the history of it, the scientific history.  Great reads, science is so cool! There is so many awesome science books out there, everything i have recently read i had to re-read over and over again because it was so interesting.

Even when i was a little girl i found this stuff fascinating. I remember having a conversation with my mom (remember my mom is a little out there so to speak) about some science books i had been reading, i think i was about 12. She asked me if i wanted to kill people, she actually thought that i would become a serial killer when i got older. What a dumb B!

That wasn't the only time someone took my curiosity and eagerness to learn out of context. I told my grandmother when i was a senior in high school that i wanted to go to college to be a forensic anthropologist. My high school made you pick a major when you were a freshman and you had to stay with it your entire high school career(which is dumb i might add). I picked criminal law, it was really interesting and i also got to go on ride along's with detectives and other kids of cops, which was really fun and interesting, the stories i could tell you...But my grandmother who i was living with at the time, told me only weirdo's go to school for that and she didn't want me to be a weirdo. I told her that most of those weirdo's love there job and make a decent amount of money. She still said no, so i didn't take classes that would lead me into loving something i could do for a living.


I don't understand why anyone wouldn't be interested in this stuff, its so cool and fascinating. I like to take adventures when i read, funky adventures. I like to read books that will give me intense, strange  dreams, maybe even nightmares. I can't get into a fictional book like i can one about the brain or what people used to use for condoms long ago. I may be strange maybe a bit eccentric, but if you ever go to a party with me be prepared to laugh your ass off watching peoples faces when i tell them of all the different foreign objects found in the human body, or some other fascinating little tid bit.