and the cucullaris muscle of the shark, after a bit of evolutionary magic, becomes Gizmo's cleidocervicalis, cervical trapezius, thoracic trapezius, sternomastoid, and cleidomastoid muscles. You know them as your "traps" and your sternocleidomastoids (which you use to turn your head).
It was somewhere around the muscles that things started going wrong. Each muscle has a name, an origin and insertion, and a function. Acromiodeltoid. Origin: acromion process. Insertion: deltoid ridge. Action: retract and abduct humerus. Group: superficial shoulder muscles. Repeat, for somewhere well over a hundred other muscles. Repeat, until able to identify when pinned. Repeat, to the exclusion of neuro lab and social life.
Prior to this I had understood that I'd need to make more time for the lab. With three contract projects, and two other classes (including organic chemistry), the only two stashes of time I could plunder were my graduate neurobiology lab and my personal time. Neither was particularly appealing. As short on charm as lobsters are, they're an absolute pleasure to dissect in comparison to cats (the process approaches meditation to me), the tools and equipment are excellent, and the other people in the lab don't make a habit of interrupting me. Needless to say, it had to go, along with my already limited personal time. Study time went into the evening, a decision that later came around to bite me on the ass.
Midway through the pelvic appendage muscles I started having dissection dreams. I don't particularly feel like relating them. I think it was at this point I told my friend Natalie how desperately I missed my lobsters. Most of all, my mind was beginning to change. My semantic network was coming unravelled; a new architecture was under rapid construction and the ripples of that were throwing everything else out of balance.
The dreams crept into days, or days into dreams, I'm not sure which. With the midterm approaching, I forced myself into an enhanced assimilation mode, in which I could learn far more rapidly. It's a mental discipline I learned when I was younger, but it's not without a cost: inability to sit still, rapid and aggressive speech, impatience, low tolerance for frustration, and generally turning into a miserable fucking bastard. And the crash, which came shortly after the lab midterm, was worse.
Natalie burned me a mix CD. One of the songs was a perfect narrative for the changes to my own mind. I seem to recall laughing maniacally when I heard it, or maybe crying. Maybe both. I got an 82.5 out of 84 on the lab midterm. Our bonus question from that midterm? "If you chop a cat in half through the stomach, what muscles will you cut?"
I slept for the next 12 hours, cuddling my three pet cats.
Speaking of stomachs, whose turn is it to feed Gizmo and scoop her poop?