I've been looking through my old assignment book and trying to determine what I was doing on February 21, 2003. Most notably, I was dissecting a crayfish for sophomore bio. We really didn't dissect it so much as cut off its shell, sever all its left limbs, pull out its guts, and jam pins in it. As a weak-stomached person, I can tell you that crayfish dissection is not for the faint of heart.

Crayfish (or, as I grew up calling them, crawdads) are absolutely disgusting. Formaldehyde-soaked crayfish are one of the smelliest things to grace a lab table. They have little beady black eyes, and I couldn't even function during the dissection until I got my partner to pin little slips of paper over the animal's eyes. As I slightly hysterically noted, "It keeps looking at me!"

One of the related assignments we received was to "draw a cartoon/picture or write a short poem about this unit's dissection." (I wish I was kidding.) The following is the poem that resulted:

'Tis the voice of the crayfish, I heard him opine:
"You have soaked me too long; I must stink of that brine!
As a hawk with its talons, so you with your blade
Have slashed out my innards; a fine mess you've made!"
He's an amputee now with no limbs on his left.
Has the loss of his carapace made him bereft?
And what might have been? No friendship was started;
Live folks don't mix with the dearly departed.

Poetry geeks will recognize it as an attempted parody of the first stanza of Lewis Carroll's 'Tis the Voice of the Lobster, which was itself a parody of Isaac Watts' The Sluggard.