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Wednesday, April 13, 2005
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SNAPSHOTS FROM HOME LES GIRLS! So here's UD, on a marvelous spring afternoon, at the National Institutes of Health, waiting for the "campus" shuttle (everyone calls the massive grounds of NIH "the campus") to take her to the Clinical Center, where she will, as she does every fifty days, give blood. Because of health and security worries, this once-simple procedure has become complex. But UD doesn't mind - the higher the hurdles, the nobler she feels when her blood goes into the tube. ---------------------------------------------------------- In fact, though, now that it's over and she's at Teaism, a chai room off Dupont Circle, it seems to UD that the procedure went unusually smoothly and quickly this time. The shuttle arrived immediately, and there were no other customers at the blood bank, so they interviewed, iron-tested, and blood-pressured UD right away. "You've got a lot of scar tissue here on your arm," said the nurse to UD, who wondered if the nurse thought pure-as-the-driven-snow UD was a heroin addict. "I've given a lot of blood," UD replied. "They always use the same spot." [Teaism's featuring Arabic music today... "Habibi! Habibi!"] [And did I miss this before, or is Teaism a chick joint? It's just us girls upstairs here in the bright quiet little room overlooking the Q Street galleries...] UD prefers NIH to the Red Cross for purely personal reasons. Her father, an immunologist, spent his whole career at NIH, doing cancer research, and as the shuttle drives by various labs he worked in, UD feels nostalgic. [Girls, girls, girls. How could UD have missed it before? She finds herself wondering if Andrea Dworkin, who lived in Washington, ever came to Teaism. Would she have been able, in this hyper-copacetic setting, to summon sufficent bitterness for her diatribes?] [Dworkin must have been very bitter. Since she began her attempts to shut it down, the pornography business in the United States has increased a thousandfold or so. It has become, as Frank Rich documented in a long article in the New York Times magazine, a massive, massive success. There's even a cottage industry (you thought this post would have nothing to do with universities, didn't you?) in frat boys doing porn movies with porn actresses who visit campuses for that purpose. (See the latest dustup about this -- at California State University -- here.)] ----------------------------------------------- Now, at 1:30, on the Metro to Foggy Bottom, UD examines the thick rubber bracelet the nurse at NIH gave her. It's like that yellow Lance Armstrong thing, only this one is blood-red and has inscribed on it GIVEBLOOD. |