a bit of Russia in DC

I donated blood this morning, as I do every eight weeks. Ever since 9/11, there has only been one entrance to the National Institutes of Health campus that non-employees can use, and going through this entrance means going through a rigorous security checkpoint. Today when I first turned into the entrance, there were guards at the initial sentry point, which is something I’ve never noticed before. Generally an NIH visitor sails through the sentry point and proceeds to the security checkpoint ahead. I wondered if I should’ve stopped to ask these guards if it was okay for me to proceed, but then I decided against it and sailed through as usual. When I hit the security checkpoint, it was abandoned. It was the spookiest thing. And I wondered, “Should I have stopped at the initial sentry point? Is that how they’re doing things now?” It seems like every time I’m there, they change some facet of the security process or the blood bank parking situation, so it’s possible the whole process has been turned on its ear since my last donation. I started to panic, wondering if the sentries were going to come chasing after me, SWAT team in tow, to haul me off to the Homeland Security headquarters. I expected them to shoot out my tires and fell me with a tranquilizer dart (it wouldn’t have been needed; I’m so out of shape, it would’ve taken them all of a millisecond to catch me in a foot race). But rather than turn around and return to the sentries, I simply proceeded to the blood bank’s parking garage, which I guess was okay, because nobody tackled me after I parked my car.

I headed inside, and the woman who did my intake had me recite my full name and birthday (to make sure I’m not an imposter, I guess), and after I did so, she exclaimed, “Oh, you’ve got a birthday coming up!” I unenthusiastically grunted/snorted an affirmation and she replied, “I just had a birthday recently, and I was born the same year as you. 33 isn’t bad!” I felt like screaming, “WHAT DO YOU MEAN! 33 WAS THE AGE AT WHICH JESUS CHRIST WAS CRUCIFIED!!!!!!!” But I didn’t. I was just like, “Yeah, I know.”

And really, she’s right. Especially since—as she pointed out—the alternative (not living long enough to see one’s 33rd birthday) is much worse. I have no genuine complaints about my impending birthday. Truth be told, I’m a lot happier than I was at age 23, when my life was a pathetic mess, or at age 13, when I was trapped in the vile purgatory known as junior high, or even at age three, if you consider the fact that at age three, I was still being dragged to Hershey Medical Center a few times a year for neurological testing because of my craniosynostosis, I was on the cusp of developing acephalgic migraines, and I was on the cusp of having to undergo occlusion (ie, eyepatch) therapy for exotropia.

Anyway, the blood bank staff really wasn’t on the ball today. Alone in the intake cubicle, I had to ring the buzzer for them twice, and they can’t claim they were too busy to respond to the first buzz because there were no other patients in the donating room. It’s not that I’m an overly impatient person—I just wanted to get the donation over and done with so I wouldn’t be too late to work. Once I was in the chair, it took the phlebotomist forever to get started. After she finished getting all the blood she needed, she did something that caused the blood to spurt everywhere out of the tube. It was on the floor, on my hand, and on my pants. Blood on my freaking pants!! Thanks, lady.

In the snack room, as I was wrapping up my post-donation snack, she poked her head in and said, “Uh…I forgot to get your iron sample.” (I’m in an iron study at NIH and they have to withdraw a sample every time I donate blood.) So I had to go back into the chair, and this time she wanted to get the sample from my other arm, which has, like, no veins in it. I didn’t think she’d have any success, but to her credit, she did manage to find a very small, buried vein and managed to pull a small sample from it, and this time she did it without spurting the blood everywhere. Yeah! But it means that I had to show up at work with both arms bandaged, which made people gape at me. I simply shoved them aside and headed straight for the pile of unbelievably delicious chocolate my boss just brought back from Prague.

Over the long holiday weekend I did some freelancing, spent lots of time vegging on the couch with Netflix DVDs (the best of the lot: Pan’s Labyrinth) and my Lost DVDs, and spent Saturday at Marjorie Merriweather Post’s Hillwood Museum and Gardens in DC with Mom and Bill (photos here). It was kind of a bitch to find, and the parking situation made no sense, but nonetheless, everything was so beautiful—I barely even minded the outrageous heat (thank god I thought to slather SPF 50 sunblock on my face and arms in advance; I would’ve been roasted alive without it).

I was really pleased to learn that Post had a huge interest in collecting Russian art. A Russian dacha was even built in her gardens! Her mansion had a huge portrait of Catherine the Great hanging in her stairwell and rooms specifically devoted to Russian icons, Russian liturgical items, and Russian porcelain. Many of these things were sold to her by the Soviet government so they could raise funds for industrialization. Basically—no shocker here, to be honest—they pillaged the Russian people’s past in order to fund their future. The items in question really ought to be given back to Russia, for display in museums and churches.

With all the beautiful Russian artworks around me, I almost felt like I was back in St. Petersburg—especially since a bus loaded with Russian tourists was there at the same as us, and so everyone around me was chattering in Russian. Considering my Russian skills are limited to saying thank you, good-bye, train station, yes, no, lamp, cat, aunt, and raspberry, conversing with any of these folks wasn’t really an option.

After touring the gardens (including a pet cemetery!) and the mansion we hit the gift shop, which sold a wealth of beautiful Russian treasures that were wildly overpriced.

Afterwards we went to dinner at the Indonesian place in Wheaton that has a ginormous vegetarian menu. I ate curried vegetarian shrimp and banana fritters until I nearly barfed. Now that’s what I call a Saturday night.



song heard most recently before posting:
Overture, Suite No. 2 in B minor—JS Bach