In exactly one week, just about to the minute, I'll be starting my new chapter. Crazy. Things have been unbelievably and, at times, unbearably hectic. Between packing my whole life into boxes, cleaning for the going-away party, planning said party, and just trying to squeeze in all the people who are trying to get their last minutes in with me...I'm surprised I haven't had more breakdowns.

Still lots to do, though most of my things are pretty much packed or donated to Salvation Army.

I'm never really quite sure what to do with myself lately. I frequently have talks with Casey about moving, each time asking her nicely to not fuck it up with the roommate. Please.

It pretty much goes without saying that I haven't been writing, or reading for that matter. A handful of us went to the Mutter Museum on Monday. It was a wonderful day. Rainy at times, but that didn't seem to matter. I like the city best when it's cloudy anyway.



We saw lots of weird stuff. Like the colon of a man who was pretty much inexplicably constipated his whole life. (He died young, obviously.) Tons of fetuses and fetal skeletons, which look like demons, or what I think demons look like. The skeleton of a dwarf woman (and the skull of her baby by her feet) who was in a difficult labor because her baby's head was too large for her pelvis, so the doctors tried to crush the baby's head to get it out. That didn't work, so they decided to do a cesarean. The baby obviously died, and the woman died 3 days later of infection. How tragic.

I stared for a long time at the skeleton of a young man who died at 39 of a painful disease in which his bones grew into his muscle tissue. His skeleton looked like petrified shreds of meat. He was basically turning into stone.

The museum is largely a museum of medical anomalies, but about a third of it speaks to medical malpractice. So glad it's not the 1860s anymore. Did you know President Garfield died of infection after he was shot? He could have been saved, but they didn't know about germs, and they also didn't know that you can't give nutrients rectally, which explains why he also more or less starved to death. Fuckin' amateurs.