CorpGoth's Mid-Month Status Report: Love What You Do

Lovely Trystan in her blog This Is CorpGoth has given us an opportunity to tell about our career, school or other vocation. More precisely, what we love about what we do. Here is Trystan and other participants, go and check what they love about their careers!

I study Finnish literature at a university and I love it. Basically this means that I study theories and methods of literature studies in general, like in comparative literature, but I am to focus on developing my expertise on history of Finnish literature and the institutions that have an effect on it (like changes in the field of publishing, stipends for writers and so on).

I love reading fiction, I love studying those theories and especially I love how literature studies have changed the way I see the world. It is like I have these gogglers and I can see how our culture is full of conventional features that are actually from fictional literature.

And besides, in our examinations part of the books are fiction. For example I have read 12 children's and youths' books including Harry Potter and Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and the questions were like "tell us about the horror elements in Wonderland" and I got study-points for it. How cool is that!

At the moment I am doing my bachelor's thesis about a Finnish novel from the view-point of menippean satire and rhetorical devices. I could go on and on about it, but I must restrain myself. I just post a pic where are some of the theory books I am probably going to use.

In general, I strongly encourage people to read more fiction, it is fun and makes you see the world from a new angle, trust me!

Adventures in Taxidermy, or at least with a Skull

Last weekend I was visiting my family and as a dinner we had a rabbit. While my father was disemboweling the creature and chattering away about should we give brains and other parts we were not going to eat for the dogs, I started to think about the skull. It would be a pretty little decoration in a house or as a jewellery, so I asked if I could try to boil the head of the dead rabbit. I had never done anything like that before, so I was excited about a new experience. My mother was first against it, because it is quite smelly business. So she insisted that I should put a lot of allspice to the water and it was not smelly at all.

It was not a pretty sight, I must say and that is one of the reasons I did not take any photos of the process. It was just a grey lump in the kettle. People tend to whiten the skulls, but I like it like that, more natural-like.

There are no specific instruction about how long one should boil the head, but for a small creature, like the one I was experimenting with, recommendation was one hour if young mammal and about 3 hours if it died old. I cooked it about two hours and when I was removing flesh with a toothpick the jaw got separated. That is the risk if one cooks the head too long, other parts fell off too, not just soft tissue.

That was not really a problem for me. I preferred it to be easier to remove flesh and get a 3D puzzle than the option of a smelly little skull, if I can't get all soft material out of it. First it was a bit awful and slimy, but then I got used to it and it was rather fun to clean the skull.

Boiling a skull is the easiest way to clean it, if one is trying it for the first time. Other ways are for example maggots or through a process of decay. A third option is dump the skull into a anthill. The little buggers eat everything.