i've blogged about serial killers before.
if i'm correct, that's my second blog. i'm really too lazy to check. this is my twenty-second blog this month, so that's a lot of clicking on that giant orange button that says "older posts."
serial killers are decently taboo.
a lot of things are taboo. they vary from culture to culture. a lot of things that we do here in the united states would be absolutely scandalous in say... zimbabwe.
there are (generally) two taboos that are universal. drum roll please:
1. incest.
2. cannibalism.
a lot of cultures have different definitions of incest. generally, brothers and sisters are out in terms of marriage, but not necessarily cousins. i learned in my anthropology class that it's usually socially acceptable to marry your cross cousin.
i don't have a cross cousin. on either side of my family.
but this blog is kind of sort of maybe not really about serial killers, so the main taboo that's on my brain right now is cannibalism. yes, it's nine fifteen at night, i just got off work, and i'm thinking about cannibalism. i've been thinking about it all afternoon. my mind is a circus with too many trapeze artists and a lion that's not trained well enough.
if you know me well (or you've read my blog about serial killers) you know that they're a hobby of mine. i wrote that awesome sixteen page paper on them equipped with a presentation that involved me carrying around a human skull (relax, it was plastic.). it really freaked out my orchestra teacher, and it came in handy later when i had to act out a part of hamlet (alas, poor yorick, i knew him!). but i digress. fact of life: i like serial killers.
another fact of life: i watch criminal minds like there's no tomorrow. i watch it more for the killers and what they do and how they behave more than for the action and the character interaction (all of which is fantastic, by the way). today, after physical therapy, i decided that i wanted to watch criminal minds, but i didn't really feel like frequenting the two seasons that i own; i wanted to watch season three.
like a good college girl, i opened my google chrome and proceeded to my favorite website that lets me watch criminal minds episodes for free, no doubt illegally. i clicked on an episode in season three i'd only seen bits and pieces of on television while studying for an organic chemistry exam. the part that i saw looked decently intriguing. and the killer looked like jeffrey dahmer, which gave him extra terrific points from me, the avid viewer and killer enthusiast.
halfway through the episode, the reliable BAU team had decided that their killer was a cannibal. the conversation between the team went something like this:
"how did we get to cannibalism?"
"well, they'd all been frozen and he wasn't abusing them sexually. and he took their legs."
"cannibalism. the greatest taboo. don't we have a lovely job?"
"it's like a sexual urge. a crosswiring of the most basic human drives. sustinence and sex."
so, they got to cannibalism.
i had this on my brain the entire episode, even after they caught the cannibal, flew back to virginia, and i moved on with my life. i moved my life onto dinner.
i'm a vegetarian. so i didn't have any terrifying images of my hamburger suddenly becoming human flesh because, well, my veggie burger looks like... a veggie burger. i got through dinner just fine without feeling disgustingly sick to my stomach. until dessert.
my mother baked short bread and put strawberries on top with whipped cream. strawberries are my favorite food, so i was super stoked. while we were eating, the conversation turned to old reality shows, and we reminisced about fear factor. i loved that show except when they had to lie in tanks of tarantulas. this lead to how the second challenge usually led to something disgusting, like fishing through sewage or drinking something terrible. this then led to talking about how survivor challenges used to have a "here drink this nasty stuff for immunity" challenge while fear factor was still on air. and then my mother said, "hey, wasn't there a year where they had to drink a milkshake made out of cow's blood and milk?"
suddenly my strawberry juice looked a hell of a lot like blood.
no, i did not finish my shortcake. and no, i did not vomit.
cannibalism and incest. the two universal taboos.
because my mother is a biology teacher, i have enough genetic knowledge to actually write a fairly detailed blog about the dangers of incest. what i have on cannibalism is this: in the movie the book of eli, eating people makes you shake. if you run into a shaky person, you run the hell away. i don't think this is factual. i just know that denzel washington makes a really badass blind guy trekking across a nuked america with a braille bible.
go, denzel, go.
(i don't know how to end this blog. it's awkward and taboo and not the best. so i'll just end it by cheering on denzel washington as he kicks butt on his way to alcatraz where that guy from heroes has a library.)
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