Bank O' Weirdness

February 25, 2008

Erica Orloff has an interesting blogpost about her Bank of Weirdness--essentially asking people 5 things about themselves that are strange or weird or unique, like, in her case, having been cast adrift in the Bermuda Triangle in a dinghy.

With some hesitation, here's what I wrote about myself:

I have to take a deep breath here because some of my oddities might be a bit problematic for some people, well...

1. Both my wife and I used to work for the Placenta Tissue Registry at Michigan State University, where human placentas were sent in for research purposes.

2. I worked in clinical cytogenetics for 18 years--that's chromosomes, in case you were wondering.

3. While there I was somewhat expert on products of conception, which is to say, dealing with the tissues that come about after a miscarriage.

4. I have taken scalpels and "scissored" human embryos/fetuses into mush in order to process them for chromosome analysis (told you people might not like this).

5. For a couple years period in my career I worked in the following areas: diabetes research, spinal meningitis research, bladder cancer research, squamous cell carcinoma research. For the spinal meningitis research I used to inoculate rabbits with bacterial meningitis so we could perform MRI on them.

That's plenty, I think.

***

I would probably also add that I spend a fair amount of time in the company of imaginary people, but many of you are writers yourselves and almost all are readers, so you've got that problem, too, I imagine.

How about you? How weird are you?

Cheers,

Mark Terry