I do not wish to be embalmed.
I have a better plan.

To be embalmed is to be....
Bathed and disinfected by someone I don't know.  Joints bent and broken to relieve rigor mortis, so I can be posed in a restful sleeping position.  Mouth held shut by sutures, so it doesn't fly open at an inopportune time and scare the shit out of some poor fool at the "viewing."  
There will be many embalming chemicals pumped in to replace my blood, and then my whole body will be vigorougsly massaged to ensure proper distribution of said fluids (so I don't burst wide open and make a mess, God forbid.)  Then, all my organs will be vacuumed out through a hole in my belly, which is then corked up so I don't leak.
Finally, the spa treatment.....make up and hair done, etc. so everyone can file by at my final party and exclaim, "She looks so BEAUTIFUL!  So LIFELIKE!"  Dear God, is there anything in this world stupider than that particular phrase?

By the way....there's something very, very strange about people's reaction to seeing a corpse.
I'm sorry, but dead bodies are not beautiful (except to the necromantics among us), or peaceful, or lifelike.  They are simply dead. The special kind of "lovely wind" that made them your beloved wife/lover/mother/friend has exited the building, and it shows.  

Anyhow.....the coffin lid is shut, you get to lead the parade of cars as V.I.P for the day, which sounds okay, even though you don't get to look out the window during the ride and enjoy feeling like Queen Elizabeth as you observe all but the rudest members of the county stop driving and wait for your parade to pass by.  On the other hand, there's even a real-live LIMO for your lucky nearest and dearest to ride in! And they, being still breathing, can revel in the celebrity on the way to the graveyard.  "Once more around the block, please?"  Finally, you find your destiny - taking up some of the earth's precious real estate as you and your fancy box lie 6 feet underground, rotting away slowly - fingernails and hair still a-growing - as family members (might) make the pilgrimage to decorate the grass above with flowers on your birthday.  Flowers that will either be (1) tacky and plastic or (2) dead in a month.

Have hope, my friends!  This atrocity need not be!
You may choose to have an at-home funeral.  Families have far more rights to do whatever they want to do with their loved ones bodies than most people realize.  Coffins may be purchased online for a mere fraction of what a funeral home will charge.  Caskets are marked up tremendously.   A $3,500 casket generally costs the "home" about $700.  That is evil business, in my opinion, fleecing grieving people out of their money like that......preying on sad people's misplaced and pointless desire to give their dead loved one "the best going away party money can buy!"

Personally, I want my "good" organs (the ones that may be useful in saving the lives of others) taken out via scalpel.  Then burn the rest....in a cheap canvas bag or a pine box.  Give my ashes first to my husband, who is under strict orders to keep me by his bed and talk to me every night, and then, later, to my children, who will wonder what on earth they should do with me after my husband has joined me in death.  Imagining S & E puzzling over what to do with our ashes is a source of mirth to me, I must admit.  To me, this end is so much more dignified and normal than what our society traditionally does to our loved ones remains.

So.....for the hundred billionth time in my life, I am spending a few minutes pondering this whole funeral tradition thing and wonder what in the hell is WRONG with the status quo.