As I've mentioned before - I am a very squeemish baby about certain meat products prepared in certain ways - particuarly when it's in a form that looks similar to when it was a living creature. And the more I experience and study and learn in life - like the monthly inconvience; health and biology classes, my pregnancies; the c-section I was awake for which wasn't a long enough inscission and I felt and heard the quick extra rip they had to do to pull him out; holding Jacob in the ER when he got the stitches in his head (he was 3 years old); watching in agony as they tried NUMEROUS times to find a vein in Jacob's tiny dehydrating body (he was a newborn); cleaning and pinching closed the deep gash on my finger and trying to apply a butterfly bandage (I was 30 something); walking past a large extended family scraping/cutting/preparing a very large pig on a spit in their yard (when I was about 8) etc. etc. etc. - the more I'd rather just stay clear of ever eating any meat, especially never handling it!
A traditional Thanksgiving meal with turkey and dressing and gravy is one of my all time favorites though (as long as I don't have to actually handle or look at the bird until it's in nice little non-living animal looking slices). Almost every year some major thing (probably minor things to everyone else) seems to happen just before an anticipated Thanksgiving meal - like that year when I walked past that pig they were about to roast in their yard - and I just can't handle any meat.
This year, I was doing pretty good. I've been so busy and I hadn't thought about it, grossly or yummily. But then, just before Thanksgiving, my Biology teacher - a young guy who really likes biology and his interest and enthusiasm is contagious and so class and labs are fun even if reguarly I really don't care about innards of plants, bacteria, or animals - he had a "fun" project for us. I had been so relieved when I'd found out we weren't going to have to disect anything in this biology class and I was doing just fine with the drawings in the book of living organisms innards, but that evening he'd set out LOTS of jars with specimens for us to go around the room and identify. Some jars were "harmless" and had coral, others had dead bloated things floating in clearish liquid. I tried, I did. I had to leave the room - I ran out into the hall and to outside and took several breaths of cool air. My stomach heeved. When I went back in, I sat near the door and far away from THOSE jars and studied the pages in my book with nice drawings (no photographs) of innards. I'm such a wimp. And there goes another Thanksgiving.
update: by the time we actually got to J & V's I was doing much better. And, since she is dealing with morning nausea and she didn't want to deal with a whole dead bird, she just made a very nice roast. It was delicious, perfect. Thank you!
