Grieving for a jar, also known as, my visit to the morgue.

'He danced and probably 
walked barefoot on the beach.
 This foot, had a favourite pair of shoes.'

 Being a glamorous artiste isn't all about fancy studios and bowls of fruit, sometimes it's just you and a few classmates taking a train...to the morgue. I recently took a mandatory Life Drawing class that barely anyone turned up to, and irony of the relatively high level of attendance for the optional Morgue visit was not lost on me (there was limited places and all of them were taken).

So we're sitting there no more than 8 of us in total, just drawing pieces of dead body, heads, feet, hands, hoping to god that the eyes don't magically open...well maybe that was just me, anyway we're all sitting there when our tutor goes 'Jesus, just think, this guy spoke and laughed and kissed' and we'd been voicing similar thoughts all day, so it might have just been the use of the word 'kiss' that silenced us for a few minutes, because it doesn't take anyone else to laugh, or talk, but the thought of the head in a jar kissing someone meant he had a someone to kiss, that someone loved him, that someone thought about him, and although we knew he'd been alive at some point, for me, for the first time, he wasn't just a head in a jar any more.

    

Foetal Skeleton at 6 months

Also at the morgue, was a room for cutting bodies up and stuff, and in this room, on shelves against the wall was a display of dead babies, there was really no way to ease into that so I thought I'd just say it, dead fucking babies on the shelves like fucking ornaments. It maddened me slightly (well more than slightly) that these children hadn't signed consent forms for their new accommodation, like the people in the other room. When I asked the embalmer about how and why these babies got there, she told me they were taken without permission from their Mothers, and the reason they were taken without permission was that they didn't need any, they were taken before the laws changed to protect them, which happened in 1961, I know this because I looked it up. So by that logic some of these children could have been taken 51 years ago, so if a Mother of one of these babies was 20 years old during pregnancy, that would only make her 71 now, so it's a very really possibility that there are women out there grieving for what these people keep in fucking jars.

Foetus with malformations, kept in a jar.

Rape. Actions speak louder than words, or do they?

A while back I was listening to the radio when a song said a woman was raped, and it wasn't a crude rap song being all 'I'm gonna rape everyone you love' and yet it blanked out the word 'rape', rape is very real, and it happens to women and men everyday and maybe we should be doing more to prevent it and get convictions when it does happen, instead of ignoring it and blanking it out. How are we supposed to talk about it, how are we supposed to teach our children about it if we can't even say it? Rape. It's not Beetlejuice. If you say it three times it's not going to appear out of nowhere. We all need to be educated on rape and how to prevent it, and also, what sort of behaviour is, if not rape, is sexually threatening and unacceptable. No means no, and an absence of a no, is definitely not a yes. Also if someone is wasted, that's not a yes either. I leave you in the capable hands of Laci Green to find out more:

Stay safe. Make good choices,