the gift of life

On Tuesday, I went to donate blood. Now perhaps you might be sitting back home and thinking to yourself, "Wow, Calvin's such an idiot, why write 'went to donate blood' when you can so easily write 'donated blood'?" Yeah, perhaps you are wondering that. Perhaps. But my sentence is crafted such because ultimately, I didn't donate blood.

It was meant to be part of some campus wide blood donation thing I think, 'cause whoever organized all of these had the Red Cross come in on several days at several locations on campus. I had actually chosen to be responsible and sign-for a slot at 12:30 instead of doing a walk-in like some munificent hero. Or perhaps it was because that was my lunch hour and I was running on a tight schedule.

So yeah, I head to the lounge of Putnam Hall, Unit 1 at 12:25 - 5 whole minutes before time, just because I'm anal about efficiency when its of direct pertinence to me. I stride up to the first seemingly responsible person I see and "Oh, I'm sorry - we didn't expect the road right outside of the dorm complex to be blocked, and we had to carry all the equipment from our van on foot. Could you come back at 1?" Yeah, so this is probably more of the organizer's fault than the Red Cross, but I'm pissed nevertheless. I give them my well practised saccharine smile, reply perkily, Oh sure, why not?" and walk out of Putnam.

I am pissed, not because I don't have anything productive to do, but because of the time I have. No no no, the word productive sounds awfully wrong. When I study, I like to set apart batches of a few hours each, that's just how I function. I like to believe that the graph of my absorption capabilities versus time is rather like a bell. Having to spend 30 minutes studying, and only 30 minutes is forcing me to waste 30 minutes in a period of low efficiency.

But whatever. I get back into Putnam at 1:05 and I'm greeted by, whoa, the RA involved of taking care of my floor and the 4th floor of Freeborn,who coincidentally I never really see. I show them some ID and I'm asked to take a seat. And so I do. And then some fat lady calls me over to her desk to go through the routine questions and blood checks. She had that 'stench' of indolence and apathy. Just from the way she carried herself and talked, I could tell that she couldn't care less about her job.

So yeah, I get my finger pricked -I always hate that part - and my blood pressure taken. And then she starts filling out a form with all my details. She's slow, but no biggie. And then we get to the matter of my birthdate. Just wanting to get the tedious paperwork done with, I quickly say

"It's August the 9th, 1988"
"What?"
"It's August the 9th, 1988"
"Is that the 6th?"
"No, miss. It's the 9th, August the 9th"
"No, the month, August. Is that the 6th?"
*FUCKING RETARD, WHAT THE HELL?!!*
very calmly: "No, August is the 8th month."

And then she leaves me to answer a crapload of yes/no questions while she goes to get herself some snacks. Have you ever had sex with another man? Have you ever used a needle to inject drugs? bla bla bla. Everything gets a "No" from me, except the question that asks me, "Have you ever been out of the US in the last 3 years." Disinterested lady comes back, and I explain that I'm international and I'm from Malaysia. She stares at me blankly and then starts going onto some online database of the Red Cross and looking for information/instructions they might have regarding Malaysia. After a while spent in what I can only describe as random clicking, she turns to me again and asks, "So what country are you from again, Iran?"

Why Iran? The poor uneducated American probably had such a lack of knowledge of geography and foreign countries that the only other countries she would know outside of the well-known European ones are Iran and Iraq, maybe Afghanistan if she had a good memory. You know what, until now the sound of Americans saying "eye-ran" and "eye-rag" is still torture to my ears.

So the disinterested lady, who suddenly has something on her hands that is not so mundanely routine that a snail would die of boredom, sits there looking at her computer, not doing anything, and saying , "Oh, I don't know what to do." At this point of time, I'm just keeping myself from speaking because I knew that if I were to open my mouth I would launch into this harsh diatribe over her epic incompetence. So yeah, after a while, she summons one of her co-workers to her aid. This co-worker shows more life and a greater degree of interest, but still largely just fiddles around with her PDA idly, going "Oh, we've never had to deal with something like that before. I don't know what to do."

So who the hell fucking does?

Apparently some older white guy in a white lab coat-ish garb does. He comes in and gets to some websites and says, "Oh, you're international? You've got to wait till at least 3 years after you've come to the US to donate blood." And because I go back home to rural ol' Malaysia for such prolonged periods of time, there are some complications that arise thatll result in me effectively never going to be able to donate blood for the duration of me being here in America. My mom's happy that well yeah, I never got poked with a needle and "running the risk of getting AIDS", but I sat in the chair next to that woman for nearly an hour. One hour of my life, just gone like that. Poof.