She said that my blood pressure was as quiet and hard to find as my heartbeat–this inside the girl who purports to have an internal storm of hurricane-like proportions. Blood donation time again. I’ve never worked with the same blood donation people twice, and I always get some intriguing, potentially metaphorical comment about my temperature or my pulse or the iron content of my blood.
It often relates to how calm my heartbeat remains while they’re sticking and prodding and squeezing me in preparation for the big draw. It’s made me realize that I really don’t get stressed about anything. My body merely illustrates what my mind already knows: Very few things are enough to light a fire of urgency under me.
You stress hounds and worrywarts out there are probably suddenly eyeing me with a touch of envy with this new information, but I assure that it isn’t always a good thing. It means that I feel almost no pressure to do the things that I’m not absolutely, 100 percent invested in. I’m a very passionate person so I still get things done, but I’m in the time of life that’s full of general education requirements, not all of which are things that I want to be doing right now, but they have to get done.
As the blood donation was finishing up (and I filled the bag in a personal record-making five minutes and 36 seconds), the girl who was taking care of me was barely watching what she was doing as she filled the five or six test tubes with the last of my red stuff. As she was sloppily pulling the last one off of the filler, she spilled blood all over my arm. I’ve donated blood more times than I can remember, but I’ve never actually bled.
Earlier that very day, I’d gone to meet a teacher and come during the hours she said I could come, but when I got there she said, “Oh, I can’t help you now. I have to do last minute preparations for my next class.” And so, on a Friday afternoon, I had to come back to school after being totally done with classes just so she could print something for me that took two seconds to do.
The above makes me sound so ungrateful. I understand and appreciate that she provides office hours for her students’ benefit and that she didn’t have to agree to meet with me at all, but it still really bothered me. It wouldn’t bother me like that if I was supposed to meet a partner to work on a scene and they called me last minute and said they had something else they had to get done. Actually, I’d probably count my lucky stars that I just got another free hour in my day. But when adults (real adults–we college students are really still just kids) fall through and don’t do things when they say they will, I have a really hard time with it.
That woman in charge of custodial jobs just won’t call me back, but if that girl in my German class didn’t call me back, it’d be fine. Why am I being so intolerant of the facts that people that are my senior are humans too? It’s because when I see a sloppy, unorganized and/or all-over-the-place peer, I’m merely looking in a mirror, and we both have time to adjust and improve. But when I see such an adult, I’m seeing where my life and unreliability could land me if I never knuckle down and light the under-fire manually, waiting instead for the nature that I don’t even have to take its course.
