Round Two

"If you prick us do we not bleed? If you tickle us do we not laugh? If you poison us do we not die? And if you wrong us shall we not revenge?"

Shakespeare knew something there. Especially about the bleeding part.

You may remember the last great bleeding-in-the-back-of-a-bus challenge. Sunday morning the Blood Bank bus was again parked in the parking lot behind the temple, calling to me.

Todd and I skipped out in the middle of a puppet show about Hanukkah to race through the questionnaire and hurl ourselves into the bleeding couches. I may have indicated that I have not been pregnant in the past six months instead of selecting the "I am male" button, but blood is blood, right?

Anyway, this time I started squeezing the foam rubber clownfish early, because they already had Todd merrily filling a bag across the aisle from me and although they told us they were timing both anyway, I felt some pressure. No one wants to blog a loss, especially twice.

Apparently, when you start squeezing early, bad stuff can happen. For instance, when the phlebotomist finally got around to the needle part, blood shot out of my arm. Some went into the rubber tubing and bag, some got on my arm, and some (though I was looking the other way) managed to hit my glasses like I was in some noir murder scene shot with the camera on a witness instead of on the victim or killer. What's in the briefcase, Mr. Tarantino? Someone bleeding so startlingly in the Blood Bank bus that the trained professionals curse in front of the Rabbi?

Probably not.

But it was pretty gross. And I started laughing semi-hysterically. I totally lost focus, actually.

So I lost the bleed off by over a minute.

What Shylock was warning us about in Merchant of Venice, my friends, was that one should never try to win a bleeding competition with a life-long Jew. If you ever find yourself in the position of trying to out-bleed one, just back down. It will save you a trip to the restroom to wash blood off your glasses later.

Lending evidence to my theory is this:

Shana and Todd's wife Sabrina went in into the bus a while later and hit the couches at about the same time.

Sabrina left for the mall a short while later while the technicians used a turkey baster to pull the last of the bag full of blood from Shana's arm. They were pretty disturbed by her lack of bleeding and more by the texture of her blood which progressed from "Like freaking Elmer's Glue" to "Holy crap -- Is that powder?" towards the end. Some ten or fifteen minutes after Sabrina left, Shana was picking up a bottle of water while the blood techs complimented her mad clotting skills.

By my reckoning, I've been Jewish about ten minutes longer than Shana has, so I bleed about ten minutes faster. This phenomenon is not (nor should it be) discussed in the polite circles of science, but Bill Nye (who is also Jewish) would tell you all about it if you agree with him that Pluto should not be defined as a planet. If you disagree about Pluto that guy will open a vein and drown you in hemoglobin, then casually wander off to play with a plaster of Paris Mount Vesuvius. Shriek in terror, little plastic Romans.

Anyway, some short time later we piled into the car, both with wrapped elbows and defeat spattered all over us, to go home for a nap. Defeat is more draining than filling a hundred bags of blood -- But it takes about the same amount of time.