Wednesday, November 25, 2009

No Plate and the blood drive

This is more of a diary type post that I'm just not sure of being of interest to even everyone sitting on this couch, so I'll start with a more fun story of what happens when cops write down "No Plate" for citing a car without a plate and you have a vanity plate of "NO PLATE."
An urban legend that is acutally true:

By the way, Snopes.com is the place to visit before you forward any desperate sounding e-mail.

Last Friday's visit to Duke
I woke up unusually early today (early enough to get a free parking spot on Anderson St. Free or illegal - the signs are confusing, but there are other cars parked there). I walked a little through Duke Gardens and then onto Campus. I feel the opposite of elitist there. A townie. I don't even know what they call a townie. No one is mean, yet.... Although OU's football team has national prominence, I don't think my Oklahoma degree stacks up favorably to Duke. Anyway, its price tag shows in the beautiful campus. Duke "Chapel" is more of a cathedrał, the kind that would be busy with tourists in Europe. Here people don't seem to notice. An iPod is more interesting than the organ.


I wandered around into a student center. I don't know the name because building signs don't abound, excepting the somebody engineering school in the somebody building in the somebody center. Maybe the New York system, like PS # 15 would be easier. Again, I digress.

I saw a sign for a blood drive. Donating blood has been on my to do list for 3 or so years. The Red Cross would call on the three past donors in our house frequently. But it never happened, even with a lot of free time. I tried in France, but just like we worry about potential donors spending too much time in Europe, they worried that I had not spent enough time in Europe.
Today, I couldn't claim it was inconvenient, and I probably wouldn't faint, just get close. Dozens of IVs at Duke, and I still almost faint.

Lying on the stretcher, I remembered blood drives at OU, a source of much of my T-shirt supply. That made me think of a campus ministry meeting more than 10 years ago. Melinda, a nursing student, told us that she and other nursing students were giving vaccine shots nearby. "Come on out - we really need the practice!" Um, we all really like you, but no. She is gone already. Things aren't as they should be. She was the first girl , married to the first guy, I can remember at OU.

The nurse saw me squirming and asked if we I wanted something. Yes, please. Can we get an orange juice OVER HERE! Rang out across the room. I wanted to hide: don’t look at the ready to faint weak who needs orange juice.

Overheard from a nurse:
"Roy can't help because he's busy getting ready for the short bus." [the bus for special education kids] I wanted to stand up and say, "Us short bus people are proud!" But I was still in the stretcher and had a needle in my arm, so standing up would have been disastrous. The first part of my two bus trip to my magnet high school involved a short bus that was free at the moment. It had the handicapped symbol and the lift, and it added additional stigma onto going to the nerd school.

Everyone was friendly, and I was called sweetie a lot.

No T-shirt at the end, but did I really need another? Can you ever have too many T-shirts, given stains and the compelling need to avoid laundry cycles less than a month? To my shame, I have actually started to buy shirts. I am growing up. But I'm still cheap. The last purchase was 3 shirts for $10.

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