Knives, Guns, Woodchippers, and More: Trauma Interpretation in Our Nation's Capital

I'm in Washington D.C. for the annual conference of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences. It's a professional/scientific conference that features papers with titles like, "Unusual Suicides Utilizing Chainsaws..." ....which implies this is a thing rather than an isolated incident. That's totally on my list of talks to attend even though it's at 8:30am.  The 8:45am slot in that session features "Accidental Injury Caused by a Handheld Circular Saw: An Unusual Industrial Accident," followed by "Circular Saw: No Enigma?"  Other talks I'm interested in going to include, "Bone and Body Part Deposition in Rivers: Where to Look for the Rest of the Body," "Who Let the Dogs In? The Admissibility and Scope of Testimony of Dog Handlers," "A Comparative Study of the Effect of Four Loko alcoholic Beverages and Other Alcoholic Beverages on Inexperienced Drinkers" [one of my co-workers noted that they hoped the talk was simply a slide that said BAD IDEA], "A Unique Cause of Death in a Double Hot Tub Fatality: Electrocution by Implantable Cardioverter Defibrillator," "The Juvenile Psychopath: How Young Can We Diagnose Psychopathy and Is This Even Helpful or Ethical?" and "The Continuing Journey of the Mortal Remains of St. Damien: the 'Leper Priest of Molokai'." This is only a small selection of the talks I'm considering attending, and there are a number that I'm curious about simply because of the titles. For example, I have no idea what "Till Death Do We Dye?" is about beyond the fact that it's under the Pathology/Biology heading and part of a session titled 'Thank You for Smoking- Department of Health and Human Services: Autopsies' and is doubtless some horribly awesome pun relating to the subject of the talk.

There are a bunch of posters that I'm planning on checking out as well. They include, "A Peculiar Case of a Perineal Injury Miming Sexual Abuse in a Child Run Over by a SUV," "Persistence of Volatile Organic Compounds Associated With Human Decomposition on Carpet Samples," [aka: Holy shit the smell of death is tenacious and sticks around on fabric FOREVER] "Some Like it Extra Dry: Specific Skeletonization Patterns Due to Larder Beetles,"  "Effect of Concealment on Necrophagous Flies Access," and "Quantification of Color Changes in Human Decomposition Using Image Processing Software." [Color changes on a rotting body?! I'm sure there'll be pretty slides for that talk!] I'm not attending any of the special workshops or breakfast sessions, but they too have fabulous titles like, "The Thomas A. Krauss Memorial Bitemark Breakfast" and "How to Write Bestselling Novels and Screenplays in Your Spare Time." [I am not making this up, guys. Kathy Reichs is one of the speakers on that one. IN YOUR SPARE TIME. Because why would anyone want to stop looking at dead people as a main job?] I also haven't made any particular effort to include some of the punnier titles in this rundown. There's one about soil trace evidence that involves the phrase "Getting the Dirt on the Suspect," and a review of friggin' EIGHT cases appropriately titled "Overkill..."

Clearly I have found my people.  In addition to the awesomeness of this upcoming conference, the delightfulness of my visit here is also enhanced by the fact that I'm lurking on the couch of one of my good friends from college, and at some point we will be going out in public both dressed in our Star Trek uniforms. That really tells you all you need to know about our friendship and her personality right there.  I'm taking a two-week vacation from work which is good for everybody: I get to take a break and everyone else gets to figure out how to run the lab in my absence. I'm sure they'll be fine.....and if I tell myself that enough, I might even begin to believe it.

The funny thing about all of this awesomeness is that the last time I spent an extended period of time in D.C. was on our eighth grade class trip here, which ranked as one of the low points for my adolescent psyche.  By that point in the year all my school friends had rejected me (without saying a word because that's how middle school girls roll) and I was pretty much at the very bottom of the social totem pole. I was already chemically predisposed towards depression and had exhibited some signs before the rejection, but the sudden switch to being a social outcast tipped me completely over the edge (particularly since my 'friends' included the girl who had been my best friend for the previous five years).  Naturally, I had no one to sit with on the plane, on the bus, or to room with, and was essentially used as a filler for spots everyone else had rejected because the other individuals involved were also social outcasts.  Being the 12-year old idiot that I was, I still disdained these people for being 'uncool' and bemoaned my fate at the forced association. I spent the majority of our time at the hotel hiding in the bathroom (which in retrospect is doubly stupid because one the girls I was rooming with ended up being one of my closest friends later on...and a guy I was at a table with for our dinner theater thingy is one of the few people from high school that I see on even a semi-regular basis), and I spent the majority of our bus rides drawing pictures in my sketch pad so melodramatic that I'm kind of shocked no one forced me into counseling or anything; these drawings were so unsubtle that I later found out the boy who borrowed my sketch pad on that trip went to the office at school and asked if I was okay.  If I were at home, I'd scan some of my amazing drawings and include them here, but I'm not. Maybe I'll remember to do so later.  Anyway, if I had packed some disposable razors or figured out how to get them from the hotel, I probably would have started cutting there and then rather than waiting a year or so to develop that little habit.

I have a group photo from that trip of us all standing on this bank of stairs next to the Lincoln Memorial (and because fate is evil, I was standing right next to my arch-nemesis/ worst tormentor...sometime that year, that little fucker put gum in my hair....though then he made the mistake of following behind me & taunting me on the way to an assembly and I snapped and spun and thwaped him in the forehead with the heel of my hand, martial arts style...it didn't occur to me at the time, but apparently word got out around school that I had punched him in the face, which was technically true, but of course he couldn't get me in trouble for it because I was just a lowly socially outcast girl and that would be embarrassing for him...generally I don't approve of myself committing physical violence, but I can't summon any regret for that one). Anyway, last week on the taxi ride from the airport to my friend's apartment, we passed those stairs and I suddenly remembered just how shitty I felt on that trip.  Then I experienced a wave of self-satisfied smugness because I KNOW that no matter what it is any of my former friends ended up doing with their lives, there is no way their jobs can possibly be as awesome as mine.  I mean, Forensic Sciences are portrayed in the popular media in a manner that's not at all accurate in terms of glamour and sexiness and frequency of gunplay and actual sciency stuff, but the one thing all those portrayals do get right is the amazing awesomeness of forensic theory and analysis.

In many ways, the career I have chosen centers on confronting the darkest aspects of humanity.  By the very nature of the profession, forensic taphonomy generally deals with the aftermath of the very worst humanity has to offer. With the exception of mass disasters, the appearance of decomping humans or parts thereof usually involves violent human agency.  I mean, one of the posters in the Pathology/Biology section of this conference is straight up titled, "When Sadistic Fantasies Are Turned Into Reality."  Even in non-violent deaths, if a forensic taphonomist is called in, it likely means sad circumstances; there's a certain pathos in someone whose death is not noted until their neighbors notice the smell.

Though the darkness and violence in my own brain was always directed inward rather than outward, it was a darkness nonetheless. I distinctly recall understanding why those boys at Columbine felt violence was a logical course of action; I considered the slaughter of others a supremely selfish act and certainly never condoned it, but I did empathize with that feeling of being emotionally stripped to the core to the point where death becomes an appealing option.  Unlike those boys, I had friends and family ties that kept me from ever crossing that line, but in given circumstances, we are all capable of horrific violence.
It's interesting for me to consider that the last time I was here, my brain was steeped in darkness, whereas now I'm here to advance a career that confronts and studies it. I'm sure there's some sort of deep psychological analysis that could go on, but this post is already excessively long and I don't really feel like getting into that shit.

This is the part in the post where I should write a conclusion that wraps up everything I talked about and connects all the dots and makes all this rambling coherent, but you know what? If you want logical, polished writing like that, you shouldn't have started reading this post in the first place. HA HA!!!! (I probably should have included that disclaimer at the beginning, but TOO BAD, SUCKERS!!!)

Be Seeing You

Probably not coming to a Hallmark near you (maybe an Urban Outfitters)

I feel like I have had an unfair advantage over most people in terms of dealing with the Sandy Hook killings. See, for the last few weeks I've been reading a book on genocide.  Unlike the review that links to, I would not list "none" under "Cons," but it's nice synthesis/survey of the general topic.  I feel like it should have been released by the Journal of Obvious Results' publishing house, but that doesn't mean it isn't interesting or informative. Actually, prior to reading Becoming Evil, I read this (which is far better than the cover would suggest...though that is pretty much the most awesome cover ever. CONTROVERSY!)  Consequently, I was really already on a roll with the "thinking about the massacre of children" train.

Also, last week I skinned out a wild pig (several, actually, but I only did one mostly by myself ), dressed her in clothing, beat her 34 times with a length of rebar (I wanted to inflict damage on the bones, and managing to do that on a dead pig that's still covered in all her piggy-ness is NOT AS EASY AS YOU THINK), and buried her in a shallow grave.  The highlight of my day was when the retired Homicide Investigator who was giving me tips on skinning the pig asked, "Am I training a serial killer?"  I assured him that if I had learned one thing from studying forensic science, it's that being a serial killer who doesn't get caught is WAY too much work for me to ever consider it.

For a while now I've been working on an art project I call the "Massacre-A-Day" calendar.  The idea is in the vein of those "Inspirational Quote A Day" desk calendar things you see, but instead of your daily origami animal, you get a massacre that happened on that day.  The idea came to me last year when there was a particularly big outpouring of sentiment over the 10 year anniversary of September 11.  I wondered how many people comprehended that it was not a unique event. That I could probably find at LEAST one recorded civilian massacre for every day in the year. Bam. Massacre-A-Day.  I haven't been actively researching for it. I figure that given my line of work/study, the information will eventually find its way to me.

When I found out about the shooting, one of my first thoughts was simply, "this gets a day."

Anatomy of a Fake Geek Girl (aka Hipster Geekin’ It)

So it seems that the inane discussion of “fake geek girls” (known to locals as tidoffg or “Fgg”) has risen once again from the gloopy, gloppy, murky, mucky waters of the nerd loch. As an individual who lives in the muck (denizens also include illustrious figures like “the idiotic debate about nerd/geek/dork titles”), I’m getting annoyed at the repeated turbation enough to overcome my innate lazy nature and add my own swamp-gas bubbles to the tumult in the vain hope that possibly my small contribution will make the stench so utterly repulsive that people will back off and leave us swamp monsters alone.

One afternoon, Fgg and I were huddled over some decomposing hagfish and I asked her to show me the worst example of a fake geek girl that’d ever grown from a glorpy glob of her skimey muck. I have to admit, it was pretty bad.

Pay no attention to the Halloween decorations

For those of you who would argue that this is not a slutty enough costume to warrant derision, need I point out that not only is this hussy flaunting her ankles, her KNEES are showing?!!!! AND her clavicles!!!! Plus, this picture doesn’t showcase the posterior aspect. Plus, she straight out admitted to me that she wasn’t wearing as much makeup as she probably would at a Con.

Me: “What are you dressed as?”

Her: “I’m dressed as Six.”

Me: “Um….how many episodes of Battlestar Galactica have you actually watched?”

Her: “Four or five.”

No wonder. I mean, Six NEVER wore a jacket like that, and why bother bleaching your hair if you’re not even going to style it right, and WHAT is with those shoes?

 

5 inch Deck Shoes? WTF?

Obviously this girl was a Fake Geek Girl who didn’t care about canon at ALL and was just hanging around trying to look sexy and pick up boys. Or feed off their lascivious attention. Or something something legitimate rape. 

The incriminating evidence only got worse the longer I talked to her.  The only video/computer games she’s ever really played are Diablo II because (and I quote) her “boyfriend bought it for [her],” and she “once played Goldeneye for five hours.” She also mentioned some other things with made up names like Solarian and Loom, but I’m pretty sure those don’t actually exist.  She freely admitted she’d never played Zelda.

Her knowledge of comics wasn’t any better. Almost everything she knows about the DC and Marvel universes is either from her friends in college or movies or Wikipedia.  She had the audacity to try and fob me off with Classics Illustrated or Scrooge McDuck. He was in DuckTales, right? That’s not comic books, you dumb bitch! Speaking of books, she’s never actually sat down and read all of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.  What a poser.

I wish I were good enough at Photoshop to make a “Number Six is not impressed” image. You’ll just have to imagine it.

NEITHER Number Six is impressed

 Be Seeing You.

Actual Thing I Actually Said

My mom was telling me about some NOVA special on Forensics in a state of crisis!!!!

Me: "Well, after crisis happens, then comes collapse, and that's when the decomposers come in. I'm playing the long game here, mom."

Closer to Harrisburg

They sell mate in bottles. I can't believe this stuff is legal.


That shirt was designed by Chris, the same friend who made the hat I'm wearing. It's the logo for her Roller Derby scrimmage team. I finally went to see her play last Friday. Or something...I don't really remember. I was mostly asleep because I'd already been out in the field for two days by that point and I was (and still am) only barely staying ahead of artifact inflow. I was tired. On the plus side, Chris' mom had made popcorn balls to sell & it turned out that they were the PERFECT field food. They use peanut butter as the lipid rather than regular butter, so it's like a punch in the face of quick energy, and it won't spoil if you leave it in your car in the sun. PLUS it has protein!!! I got really excited and ended up purchasing a total of something like 12 of them. Now, I admit that I may have consumed four of those in quick succession....make your own judgement. However, I was not ridiculously stoned as everybody proceeded to think I was. My insane excitement over finding a fab field food was not helping my case.

I don't remember if I mentioned on here that for the month of July I am running the field lab for the Foothill College Local Archaeology field school. Actually, I'm employed as a general factotum for the guy who's subcontracted the dig and my job isn't going to end when the field school does, and it's easiest to just refer to myself as "the lab". It's complicated. My ability to follow a line of reasoning like that is pretty much the reason I have my job.

Be Seeing You

Boil Update:

This weekend at the site, I was off on a jaunt (aka "going out to survey potential datums for the total station") [we will not address the confusing use of "datum" here. In short, when using the laser theodolite (that's the other name for a Total Station) one speaks of data points as "points" and the origin is the "datum."]with two of my students. The hilarity of the  hike is worth another post entirely, but suffice to say that we all learned something. And we did find a beautiful point that has incredible line-of-sight. You know what else is confusing? We're mostly digging up the remains from the production of projectile points, and we tend to refer to the finished pieces as just "points". WHY MUST EVERYTHING HAVE THE SAME NAME, BRUCE?!

Anyway, early on in the adventure we encountered some surprisingly fresh coyote droppings surrounded by distinct tufts of hair and containing chunks of a skull and a mandible.

Student: "That looks like rabbit hair."

My Brain: "If we can see the cheek-bones [that's not what they're called, but I'm not going to use words like "rostrum" here] of this thing, if it IS a bunny, they should be lacy-looking (technical term is "highly fenestrated". "Fenestrated" just means "with lots of little holes,"so highly fenestrated is...well...lacy-looking.)

Me: *Digs into poop with some sticks and extracts the jawbone and skull frag. [Though the poo was fairly fresh, the bones weren't actually covered in shit, so don't go all freaking out here. In fact, they still had little fragments of tissue attached. I bet their high fat content keeps them pretty separate from the other digestive stuffs]* I just so happened to have a collecting bag in my pocket.

My Lips: "ALL TEH PREVIOUS INFORMATION that went through my brain"

Guys, I've turned into my mom. Except without as much Latin. Does this make me a Protestant scientist? DISCUSS.

Be what you want would want....

.....but only if that's also what you want.

Yes, I know you leagues of adoring fans are thinking, "WHAT ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT, HANNAH?!" Trust me. It makes way more sense than a lot of the shit I hear around my job all day. Or think.

My awesome friend Erica ran the Western Costume Spring Western Costume Spring Yard Sale and it got featured in a piece by LA Weekly. Also, there is a photo of me wearing an awesome hat that actually turned out to have structurally weak spots at the crown and thus my head got a little sunburned.

Boil Update:
A while ago, I decided to try the cold-water maceration technique for defleshing specimens. My results from this test are as follows:
1. Small bones are even smaller than you think. Think coffee filter, not 1/16" screen.
2. They weren't kidding about the smell.

In other exciting news,  the other day I had a student say to me, "You know you've chosen the right major when it's okay to bring dead animals to school." ....I passed a squirrel this morning, but I would have had to do a major loop to come back around to get it. Now I'm kind-of regretting I didn't.
Somehow we're starting to edge towards having a zooarchaeology collection. Somehow I'm starting to learn stuff.

It's Computers All the Way Down

It's clear that the only time I really blog is when I'm trying to avoid writing something else. Right now I'm trying to figure out how to write a professional e-mail to people who actually want to hire me.  How does one say, "I have another offer. What are you willing to bid?" without sounding like an asshole? Also how does one say, "Yes. I would be willing to take on managing your field lab. I don't think I'm qualified, but clearly you do, which is adding to my sense of self-worth and encouraging me to milk you for all I can"?

In other news, Mammoth season has started again. We went out yesterday and cleaned up the site and took some auger samples of the marine stratum. At least, that's what was supposed to be happening. I don't know what ACTUALLY happened because I spent the entire day organizing sandbags. It was glorious.

We have a large number of sandbags full of dirt from the excavation.  When we put the dirt in, we wrote the provenience (ie what unit it came from/what was it associated with) on the bag in sharpie marker. Unfortunately, sun and heat wreak havoc on low grade plastics, and the bags have been outside for a YEAR, so even though they were under a tarp, the provenience on a whole bunch of bags got completely bleached off. There were also bags that still had traces of writing, but I had to sit there and puzzle out what the hell they said and then re-label them.  I was in hog heaven. No one bothered me and I was moving sandbags. The only downside is that I don't have the faintest idea what actually got done on the site.

It's too bad it's horribly unprofessional to send a tl;dr synopsis of the situation.

Be Seeing You