February 25, 2005

Ah! It feels like only yesterday I was scooping one or more rotting animal carcasses into a dumpster! Of course, this is quite silly. It was actually two days ago, not that my thighs would believe my calendar on this point. My thighs tell me quite explicitly that I must have abused them, like, thirty minutes ago, and they also kindly ask that I stop doing anything involving their movement, such as climb stairs, Jazzercize, walk, stand up, sit down, or lay prostrate and whine helplessly. My thighs aren't used to doing anything but being big pads, and lately, they have been sucking at it.

Well, you are probably wondering why I was scooping one or more rotting animal carcasses into a dumpster, or else you are off doing something else, like eating shredded cheese straight out of the fridge, in which case, fine, be that way. I will just keep right on typing away because I am stoic like that.

Wednesday had the tremendous honor of being Harding's DAY OF SERVICE, to go along with other Harding days in which we do what we are supposed to be doing all the time, such as DAY OF NOT SPITTING ON THE ELDERLY. But we are not terribly concerned about this at Harding University, where we know full well that if we do not have an acknowledged and capitalized DAY OF SERVICE we will not likely serve anybody at all, and one or more rotting animal carcasses will remain sorely unscooped.

In order to facilitate the DAY OF SERVICE, the entirety of Harding University shuts down for the afternoon. Every class is gloriously shortened to thirty five minutes of griping about how useful those other twenty minutes would have been, and chapel is moved from breakfast time to lunch time, when the student body, as a whole, is far more deodorized. After this, the students are asked kindly (But not mandated! Oh no! There would never be any mandation going on around here, no sir!) to break apart into their respective groups and head out to serve people, meaning anything ranging from (as a rough estimate) serving people to totally not serving people.

Because it is not mandated that people go serve, most students take the opportunity afforded them by the afternoon off to do those things that overzealous Harding professors have denied them all this time, that is, specifically, watch reruns of M*A*S*H on FX. Oh, they'll say, "I've got so much homework, I really just can't!" And some of them probably mean it. The nursing majors, for example, I would believe, because they are all the time vanishing for entire weeks at a time to go to something called "clinicals" involving funny uni-colored outfits and gross stories about gangrene and leprosy.

Speaking of gross, I'd just like to point out how wonderful it is that God gave us the ability to feel grossed out. Oh sure, we appreciate joy and sublimity (whatever that means) and cathartic tragedy and righteous anger, but do we ever stop to think about what life would be like without grossness? We'd probably be eating our boogers nonstop!

Anyway, I mention grossness because my job turned out to be way gross. I was part of a group that went to the Searcy Humane Society. My first job was to sweep the dust way up over my head in one of the kennel rooms. The trouble with dust over your head is that it tends to fall onto your head after it has been swept off (where did you think it would land, exactly?), and this results in sneezing, which in turns results in about 80 dogs barking loudly and uncontrollably for about half an hour (evidently the dogs don't get a lot of excitement at the Humane Society).

Fortunately, I didn't have this job for very long, because the guy whose job it was to pick up trash outside was getting sick and now that was my job. I actually don't mind picking up trash. I can do that, because it takes no skill. It becomes slightly more complicated when 80% of the trash is stuck in wet dog poopy. I decided that it wasn't worth changing jobs for again, so I went and got some gloves and started picking up poopy-covered trash, which was (and I am very thankful to God for this) VERY GROSS. I mean, think about what might have happened if I hadn't found it gross! Well, maybe you shouldn't think about that.

So, anyway, after finishing with the poopy, I decided to have a crack at the relatively poopy free trash on the perimeter of the yard, when I stumbled upon a large pile of white and gray. stuff. I couldn't quite make out what it was until I noticed a little white object that had what appeared, at first glance, to be teeth. On second glance, however, it turned out to be teeth. Teeth attached to a one or more rotting animal carcasses. I decided they were in severe need of scooping. So I got Shelby, and we scooped the mass into a bag, and it was all hanging together by rotted flesh-threads and vertebrae and mud and it was seriously gross.

That night at Bible study, a girl who I will refer to here as "Linnea Reed" tried to impress me with how gross her job was - scooping slime from grease trays in a cafeteria. "You would pick it up and shake it, and it would kind of BLORB around slowly," she said with a shudder. Then she looked at me as if to say, "How gross is that? I bet you didn't anything involving grossness today! Bow before the awesome grossness of my service project!"

And I just looked at her, with a confident smile.

And then I told her about the rotting flesh hangy threads because I'm a ho that way.