Wednesday, June 2, 2010

How I Know What Preserved Frog Guts Taste Like -- My Embarrassing Moment

I place all the blame for this squarely at the feet of one of four women -- Kari Lynn Dell, Tawna Fenske, Susan Adrian, or Linda Grimes.

So, Tawna and Susan today posted on their blogs about some of their most embarrassing moments. Tawna's moment about throwing up in her underwear was pleasantly hysterical, and Susan's rapid-fire embarrassing stories had me fairly well laughing the whole way through. Since Kari Lynn Dell suggested we make it a blog tour, I figured "what the heck? I have no shame left anyway."

Picture, if you will, me in seventh-grade science class. That was the year that we did our first dissections -- Life Sciences was the intro to Biology, which we took sophomore year -- and one of the assignments was to dissect a preserved frog.

Well, yours truly being the awkward smarty-pants 13-year-old that he was, was plugging along with his group pinning back and cutting free the pieces of the frog. I've always loved doing dissections (kind of morbid, I know, but this me we're talking about).

So there I am, awkward, trying to impress the girls in my group (Again: I was 13), and we get assigned by the teacher to blow air into the frog's lungs so we can see them inflate. We were to insert an eye-dropper down the frog's throat and blow. My team chooses me to blow into the eye-dropper, and so we shove the eye-dropper down the frog's gullet.

I take a deep breath and blow, only to have nothing happen. What did I do next you might ask? Take my mouth away, inhale another deep breath and try again, right?

Weeell ... you're half right.

I did take another deep breath. But I ... umm ... kind of forgot to take my mouth off the end of the eye-dropper.

Lo and behold, I get a full-on mouthful of preserved frog guts. Two things happened next -- I hear an "ewwww" from the girls, and I run out of the room to scrub my tongue clean of frog guts. Then I had to go back to class and well, yeah, suffice to say that if the girls in my class already thought me a dweeb they now also thought me a gross dweeb.

And that's just my favorite embarrassing moment out of the myriad in my repertoire.

12 comments:

Susan Adrian said...

EW.

Yeah, that's a good one. :)

Linda G. said...

Eeeuuww. Gross. (Good one!)

Stephanie Thornton said...

Totally gross! I passed out dissecting the earth worm in 7th grade so I got to do the frog on the computer. Much cleaner!

Kari Lynn Dell said...

Dissecting was my favorite part of biology. I got to cut up a person once. It was cool.

TAWNA FENSKE said...

Eeeew! Kinda guessing that one didn't earn you a kiss! :)

Tawna

Matthew Delman said...

Susan -- Yes, yes it was.

Linda -- This is actually the grossest of my embarrassing stories.

Kari -- I kind of regret not going farther in Biology than the course I took sophomore year of HS. Dissecting a cadaver would've been awesome.

Tawna -- Yeah, not so much. I'm reasonably convinced this incident contributed to me not dating until college.

Susan Kaye Quinn said...

That's some epic grossness there. Well done. All in the interests of science, too! Now, if those girls had any sense, they would admire someone who could consume frog guts and hold it in long enough not to throw up on their shoes.

We have to appreciate the little things in life. :)

Matthew Delman said...

Susan --

And yet, these were not forward-looking young ladies. HHTM and I had fun for awhile theorizing what would've happened betwixt us had we met in high school and not post-college. The hijinks that might've ensued would've been EPIC (at least in our heads).

Harley May said...

Oh my goodness! That is the most hysterical thing I've ever heard in my life! Had I been a girl in your dissection group I would have fallen off my chair I'd laughed so hard. This is good.

Matthew Delman said...

Harley --

It was pretty hilarious; and yes there was quite a bit of laughter on the part of the other young man in my group. Oh the embarrassing stories of one's youth.

Elisabeth Black said...

Yummy.

Once I lost the bulb of my baster, so I thought - "No problem, I'll just use my mouth to suck the scalding hot grease halfway up then let it out onto the chicken. What could go wrong?" Um, yeah. That was one of the most painful things I've ever experienced.

Matthew Delman said...

Beth --

Ay yi yi! That just sounds painful. I can't imagine how much that must have actually hurt.