Dem bones, dem bones, dem dry bones
Dem bones, dem bones, dem dry bones
Dem bones, dem bones, dem dry bones
Gonna hear the word of the Lord.

So school has me in a strangle like grip these days, hence my absence from the blogosphere. Sure, I’ve commented here and there,but for the most part, I’ve neglected my own blog like an ugly, red-headed step-child. As an aside, I wonder why the step-child has to be ugly and red-headed. What’s up with that?

Anyway, class is progressing and they aren’t kidding when they say that the structure of the body builds on itself. Basically, if you don’t get the first part, you aren’t going to get the next part. It’s like building a structure on shifting sand; the weaker your foundation, the weaker the entire grasp of the subject. Aside from having to re-teach myself 8th grade chemistry, it’s been alright. That is, until we got to Chapter 7 — the human skeleton.

Maybe it’s portentous, seeing as we are headed into one of my favorite seasons and accompanying holiday, that we start on the skeleton. This one woman I know said she dropped out of A&P when they got to the skeleton because it was so much in such a short period of time (well, that and she was thisclose to giving birth to her second child). A&P is really interesting, don’t get me wrong. I’m fascinated by how the body is shaped and why and how that contributes to the overall function, but when it’s presented in a time sensitive format, that kind of takes the shine off the whole thing. Anyway, at first blush, I wasn’t that daunted by the prospect of learning the 206 bones of the body. Pneumoic devices abound on how to remember what is called what, where it connects to the next bone and so forth.

So basically, the skeleton is broken down into two parts — the axial skeleton and the appendicular skeleton. In layman’s terms, this means the bones of your core and the bones of the limbs that hand off of them. Pretty easy, right?

Yeah, I thought so, too, until I read further along and learned about the thirty gajillion or so bone markings associated with each bone. Holy mother of pearl! Every little nook and cranny on a bone — and there are enough to put an English muffin to shame — has a name. I mean really, who on Earth sat around and named these things? And they aren’t easily memorable names either; they are random stringing together of letters to come up with things like Coronoid Process of the Mandible and Superior Articularing Facet. There are fossas, trochanters, crests, spines, lines, and foramina. How bored do you have to be to look at a humerus and give a name to each depression, scratch and groove on it? And scientists wonder why they are stereotyped to look like this: