I had my first mammogram today. I had no idea a breast could flatten out like pie dough. Very interesting. I wanted to see what my breasts looked like inside--I love being able to see inside my own body without having to cut a hole in my skin--but I had to turn my head in such weird directions, I was only able to catch a brief glimpse of the monitor. The image looked like a jellyfish, or a galaxy. The Milky Way, of course.

And now for something completely different...

I happened to walk into the room where my husband was watching an episode of Monty Python. Some characters were talking about different words and whether they were "woody" or "tinny". Sausage, caribou, bound, erogenous zones were some of the woody words; litterbin, newspaper, recidivist, were all tinny. Whenever a tinny word (or even the word tin) was spoken, the daughter would freak out; the mother even had to remind her husband not to say "tin" around her because it upset her so much. I loved it. Words can really have a heft, a substantive physical feel in the mouth, in the mind. They can make us cringe or sigh, laugh or shiver.

I used to freak out when people said certain words around me when I was little. Especially kidney and bladder. Those words would send me into conniptions. I wonder if I am so drawn to body stuff, to writing from the body, because body words carry such a charge for me.

To bring this post around full circle, those Monty Python blokes consider tit a tinny word!