We Don't Induce Vomiting or Steal Faces

Over the last 2 days I have been doing a first aid course. It was all very serious and I was quite bored until someone in the group started making rude comments. The strange woman teaching us was talking about not inducing vomiting, and how in hospital now instead of pumping the stomachs of pissed people, they just give them charcoal, and a guy said 'so they shit heat beads the next day?' We made inappropriate comments about rectal and vaginal bleeding of course. I don't imagine ever getting over my delight, fascination and humour for the human body. How can you possibly want to ignore this fantastically complex, mysterious and hilarious thing you are in possession of?

Most first aid stuff is really boring, and seems to attract those weird old short types who like to do good things in the community. I remember the Red Cross shop in Hobart, and all the diminutive and slightly hirsute older women who worked there. They all seemed so fucking weird, and now I am concerned because I now know that these folk are probably first aid gurus. My question is, what attracts someone (voluntarily) to first aid? Everyone where I work has to do first aid, otherwise I couldn't be bothered. I know this is probably very much THE WRONG THING TO SAY, yet I am happy to admit it and question the whole first aid industry rather than my humanitarian urges. What happens when we equip people with a very slight knowledge and the drive to use it? Of course I hope I never have to use it, and I suspect that although I got 30/30 on the test, by next week I will remember things about funnel web spiders but not about Expired Air Resuscitation or Cardio Pulminary Resuscitation. Clearly I need to watch more ER and buy my own defibrillator (I would like the multi-lingual $10,000 kind thanks - I don't want language to be a barrier to survival). I am now equipped with more daft acronyms, and I am interested in some serious cross-germination of them here. I think it is important to have an integrated approach. I am so fucking full of acronyms that I am tempted to always use the full name.

I like the sound of expired air resuscitation, it is somehow romantic and intimate. I can imagine it being part of a pick up line. I stole a face from the Red Cross. One of those ones you put on the mannequin to do EAR with. How can I use that to lure men? I wonder if these expert first aiders use them for those purposes? Their mouths don't open wide enough to do anything really useful.

Here's a question: why is it that people's shit, sweat, piss, dirtiness and foot odour all seem to smell slightly different, but the smell of semen is unmistakeably the same from person to person? I'm no expert of course, nor have I conducted any legitimate research in this area, but I have a healthy curiosity.

Secondly, in addition to the interest in the odour, I have for a long time been curious about the effect cooking semen. Is it like egg albumen? I have never managed to convince ANYONE I know to donate a sample for research purposes. This in itself is now more interesting to me than the result of the cooking. Despite MP and I being together for 10 years, and me promising not to tell anyone that he did it, he refused to participate.

For the entire 2 days, I had to sit very close to 2 men who smelt bad. There was a combination of old food, unwashed hair, unwashed hands, perhaps even unwashed genitals. One smelt smoky, the other one just smelt damp or curdled. If I had had my wits about me I could have said to them 'you smell different, but I bet your cum smells the same'.