Twilight: Bad Boys and Blood Drives

Content Note: Assault, Danger, Painful Sex, Painful Pregnancy, Blood Donation

Twilight Recap: Edward has beckoned to Bella across the school lunchroom and she's joined him at his empty table. Bella has suggested that Edward is possibly some sort of super-hero as an explanation for his supernatural behavior during The Parking Lot Incident.

Twilight, Chapter 5: Blood Type

Welp, I've kind of burned out on Hating On Edward Cullen for the moment, so I'm just going to assume for today that we're supposed to hate Edward Cullen because he is a bad guy, and Twilight is about redeeming him with the redeeming power of redeeming love. And, coincidentally, that works very nicely with today's conversation.

   "I'll figure it out eventually," I warned him.
   "I wish you wouldn't try." He was serious again.
   "Because . . . ?"
   "What if I'm not a superhero? What if I'm the bad guy?" He smiled playfully, but his eyes were impenetrable.

There are a lot of good reasons Edward could offer here, good reasons that could maintain his cover, but he doesn't. We've already noted that he's really bad at the whole Masquerade thing, but I think this is supposed to read more as a confession to someone he can't or doesn't want to keep lying to, and I think the scene works as that.

I don't read this as a warning -- although I kind of wish Bella would take it as such -- so much as a cry for help. "What if I'm the bad guy?" is a question that could have serious consequences for Bella ("I could hurt you, I could kill you.") but could just as easily be read as having serious implications for Edward ("I could be damned, I could be lonely, I could be miserable."). And if we're meant to read it that way -- and I think we possibly are -- it may be the first thing Edward has said that I sort of like. Edward isn't an innocent -- he's a smug jerk and a murderer several times over -- but he seems to be caught in an existential net of self-loathing, and as Robert Pattinson has reminded us, that can go a long way toward covering over a multitude of sins.

   "You're dangerous?" I guessed, my pulse quickening as I intuitively realized the truth of my own words. He was dangerous. He'd been trying to tell me that all along.   He just looked at me, eyes full of some emotion I couldn't comprehend.
   "But not bad," I whispered, shaking my head. "No, I don't believe that you're bad."

And this is sort of Twilight in a nutshell. If I was in charge of writing the synopsis on the back of the book, I'd just toss this exchange up and head off to a well-deserved lunch.

Edward is dangerous to Bella, in almost every possible sense of the term. He wants to kill her and drink her blood. He can't vampire her without posing a serious threat to her safety in the "might not be able to keep from killing her" sense, as well as the "omg painful venom transformation" sense. (And, of course, the very act of vampiring her will, in fact, kill her and initiate her into a completely different existence.) He can't have sex with her without seriously bruising her. He can't make her pregnant without going the demon-vampire-baby-breaks-your-ribs route. He dominates and controls her because he can't bear to exist without her. He leaves her without warning and emotionally abuses her because he's too inexperienced, immature, and inhuman to do otherwise.

But he's also "not bad". Well, I mean, obviously I have Very Serious Thoughts on that subject. And probably the rest of you do, too. And "not bad" is a very subjective statement and it's going to come down to personal morality and ethics and standards that not everyone is going to share. But the point is that Bella and S. Meyer think Edward is "not bad", and I think you could make an argument for Edward being "not bad" in the sense that he's (at least currently) trying really hard not to be a murderer. I'm not going to give him a cookie for that right now, but it's a start.

The problem here, of course, is that now we're in the somewhat familiar territory of the not-too-Bad Boy being redeemed by the pure love of the Good Girl, but at least if we get a redemption, I don't have to feel like I'm being asked to accept that Edward The Jerk is the best romance partner ever as is.

   "You're wrong." His voice was almost inaudible. He looked down, stealing my bottle lid and then spinning it on its side between his fingers. I stared at him, wondering why I didn't feel afraid. He meant what he was saying -- that was obvious. But I just felt anxious, on edge . . . and, more than anything else, fascinated. The same way I always felt when I was near him.

And now I have a theory.

The whole Bella/Edward romance could be shown as a destined-lovers who see each other across a room and know in that instant that they are meant for each other. But the impression I've been getting from the movies -- or, rather, from the third movie, to be specific -- is that the situation is less of destined love and more of destined being. There's something about how Bella is portrayed on the screen that makes me feel like she's being presented as a fish-out-of-water story where the problem with her environment is that she's a vampire in a human's body.

We've talked about this before, and how Twilight would be different if it was described in strong terms as Bella working less towards eternal love and more about eternal vampirism, and how the story would change in response to her motivations -- for example, if she were working towards vampirism in the hope that it might cure her chronic falling-and-getting-very-hurt disability.

The best advantage to this point of view, though, is less what it adds to the story and more what it takes away. I like the addition of a motivated Bella looking for a cure, sure, but I like more the subtraction of a Bella who refuses to take a serious warning Very Seriously because she is fascinated-by-allure, dazzled-by-beauty, and believing-in-the-goodness-of a man she barely knows. So I'm going to cling to my Alternate Character Interpretation for as long as I can.

   I jumped to my feet. "We're going to be late." 
   "I'm not going to class today," he said, twirling the lid so fast it was just a blur.
   "Why not?"
   "It's healthy to ditch class now and then." He smiled up at me, but his eyes were still troubled.
   "Well, I'm going," I told him. I was far too big a coward to risk getting caught.
   He turned his attention back to his makeshift top. "I'll see you later, then."

Edward actually has permission to skip class -- today is blood-typing day in Biology and although Bella is utterly unaware of and unprepared for this fact, the Cullens were notified in enough time so that Carlisle could arrange for Edward to skip without breaking any rules.

And this presents an interesting situation: the Cullens have special lives with special rules that apply only to them, but they are fairly careful to make sure that everything is on the up-and-up. They use their money and beauty and power and position in society to bend the rules, but they don't outright break them. Why?

This could be for purposes of the masquerade, of course -- a concerted attempt to not draw attention to themselves. And yet, they're really bad at not drawing attention to themselves, what with all their special allergies and special needs and special cars and special sunny-days-in-the-mountains and special dating-your-adopted-sibling situations. And I kind of have to wonder if Delinquent Cullens would be any more attention-grabbing than Special Rules Cullens.

Edward doesn't tell Bella right away that he has permission to skip class. Narratively, he can't because she would ask why and he would tell her his cover story about the blood type issues, and she would have to make a decision because she can't go to class either. But in-universe, his not telling her is interesting: he's making himself out to be a rebel Bad Boy, skipping class, and he seems to be tacitly watching to see if she'll follow his lead. Edward is being dangerous right now, if only in the sense of hurting Bella's grades and social standing. He's testing her limits to see how far she's willing to deviate from social expectations... and possibly to see how much she's willing to trust him.

   I hesitated, torn, but then the first bell sent me hurrying out the door -- with a last glance confirming that he hadn't moved a centimeter.
   [...] I was lucky; Mr. Banner wasn't in the room yet when I arrived. I settled quickly into my seat, aware that both Mike and Angela were staring at me. Mike looked resentful; Angela looked surprised, and slightly awed.

I get that EDWARD CULLEN IS HOT, but I really must protest at the SURPRISE AND AWE.

First of all, Bella is the most desirable girl in school right now, according to every possible indicator: three boys including the Most Popular Local Guy have eagerly asked her out (breaking all social rules in order to do so, seeing as how it was a Girls' Choice Dance) and Edward will later confirm that every guy in the school was lusting after her fervently on her first day. Whether it's because she's super pretty or super new doesn't matter: she's desirable right now, so the idea that the Hottest Guy In School might want to make a play for her is not that surprising.

Second of all, if Edward Cullen was in the mood to break his anti-social trend and find a girlfriend, Bella is clearly the perfect girl for him. She's not a native Forksian, so she's not likely to make fun of his accent and they can bond over a shared hatred of the constant rain and their longing for a nice Starbucks coffee. She's in his Biology class and seems to share a measure of competence with him, and is additionally his lab partner, so she can fill in for him on his absent days. Best of all, she's shy and introverted, so she won't fill his life with a bunch of noisy girlfriends that he won't be able to stand. Many a high school romance is built on less.

Third of all, considering that Edward beckoned her over to his table where she sat uncomfortably and her face ranged from surprised to angry to frustrated to bone-weary-tired over the course of the lunch hour, I wouldn't be all that resentful and/or surprised and awed. It's not like the two were laughing intimately or making out under the lunch table -- Bella's maybe-he-wants-me-to-cover-for-him-in-Biology excuse is ringing pretty true at the moment, especially since he didn't even show up to class. I mean, what's more reasonable at this point: that he likes her but can't follow her to class because the blood typing class will blow his cover, or that he's skipping class and asked her to pick up his homework?

   Mr. Banner came in the room then, calling the class to order. He was juggling a few small cardboard boxes in his arms. He put them down on Mike's table, telling him to start passing them around the class.
   "Okay, guys, I want you all to take one piece from each box," he said as he produced a pair of rubber gloves from the pocket of his lab jacket and pulled them on. The sharp sound as the gloves snapped into place against his wrists seemed ominous to me. "The first should be an indicator card," he went on, grabbing a white card with four squares marked on it and displaying it. "The second is a four-pronged applicator --" he held up something that looked like a nearly toothless hair pick "-- and the third is a sterile micro-lancet." He held up a small piece of blue plastic and split it open. The barb was invisible from this distance, but my stomach flipped. 
   "I'll be coming around with a dropper of water to prepare your cards, so please don't start until I get to you." He began at Mike's table again, carefully putting one drop of water in each of the four squares. "Then I want you to carefully prick your finger with the lancet. . . ." He grabbed Mike's hand and jabbed the spike into the tip of Mike's middle finger. Oh no. Clammy moisture broke out across my forehead.

My initial response to this was WTF Teacher. I mean, seriously? Do teachers just go around jabbing needles into kids without warning? Am I ignorant and inexperienced with modern American high schools to assume this isn't standard practice?

How does Bella not know about this? Was there not a permission slip sent home? How is this even remotely sanitary? There's no mention that I can see of sterilizing their hands, but the teacher is jabbing needles into their hands anyway?! I've had to give myself countless injections as part of the IVF process, and there's a very specific way you do that sort of thing, and one major thing is sterilizing the skin around the injection. (The other major thing is disposing of all the waste properly afterward.) Please tell me this is not normal.

   "The Red Cross is having a blood drive in Port Angeles next weekend, so I thought you should all know your blood type." He sounded proud of himself. "Those of you who aren't eighteen yet will need a parent's permission -- I have slips at my desk."

Wait, what? So this isn't The Blood Type Class that occurs every January 15th or whatever like clockwork but rather an impromptu thing? Now I absolutely demand to know how Edward knew about this class in advance. Oh, right, the telepathy thing. But how do you bring that up casually in conversation in order to get excused from the class? Maybe Carlisle could have "heard" that the science teacher ordered a couple dozen blood typing tests and asked him what was up? It seems kind of flimsy. I need explanatory fanfic, stat!

Also: OH DEAR GOD IN HEAVEN HE HAS PERMISSION SLIPS FOR BLOOD DONATION BUT NOT FOR BLOOD TYPING. Apparently. Either that or Charlie is really falling down on the parenting job because I have to think that with all the falling down and scraping of knees in the Swan household that it should be common knowledge by now that Bella faints at the sight of blood. There's no way she hasn't needed hospital visits and stitches before now.

Also, also: This is a personal thing, but I don't like blood donation drives. Well, let me rephrase that: I don't like blood donation drives that are pushed by someone with authority over me or others, i.e., teachers and employers. I know it's for a good cause, but my dad and I have some kind of supposedly-not-that-rare-and-I-cannot-think-of-the-name-of-it-right-now condition that makes it really painful for us to give blood. I went earlier in the year to our employee blood donation center because I needed my blood type (and donating was cheaper than going to my doctor to find out, which would have been expensive) and I did all the "right" stuff beforehand, but it was incredibly painful and I just about fainted in the chair from the pain. It was the strangest sensation; I felt like I could feel the blood leaving my body, and it was not at all pleasant.

Since then, the really incredibly pleasant nurses (who are not technically my employers but do in fact work in a building owned by my employer) have been calling me back like clockwork once a month to try to reschedule me to come in again and I feel really awful turning them down. And they ask why I won't come in, and I try to explain that it hurts, and they try to solve my problem with recommendations of orange juice, but my dad has this same problem and he went in literally a dozen times trying to power through this and it Just Did Not Work. And then one of the nurses told him it was a Condition, so he gave up. But even though I turned them down each month, they kept calling the next month and I didn't feel comfortable (what with the whole employer dynamic) telling them to Stop Calling Please.

So the last time they called, I figured that if I was going to live in a Patriarchy, I might as well make it work for me, so I told them that blood donation makes me sick and that Husband doesn't like me to donate blood because he doesn't like me to be sick and fainting and in pain all evening (no doy) and they couldn't fix that problem with orange juice, so they stopped calling. And if you're wondering why "no, it makes me sick" didn't work as an excuse but "no, it makes me sick and my Husband unhappy" did, well... there's a part of me that marvels at that too. Maybe it's a symptom of Big Mother: if I can't stand something, I need to buck up and try harder, but if the situation hurts someone who depends on me*, then it's serious.

* Which is quite amusing because despite the fact that I actually do cook a slim majority of the dinners, I depend on Husband far more than he does on me. By which I mean, Husband most definitely does not need me in order to feed himself, but I frequently need him to bring food to me.

This is a long way of saying three things. First, that it is really amazing how often Husband solves problems for me simply by existing and me using his existence as a magic talisman, and while I appreciate that the problem is solved, the world should not work that way. Second, as much as I appreciate Mr. Banner's heart is in the right place, I feel like he's using his position as a teacher inappropriately. Third, while I feel like this Bella-faints-at-the-sight-of-blood characterization is perfectly valid, I would like very much to know where this detail was during The Parking Lot Incident when Tyler was bleeding profusely from the face and neck and they were in the same hospital room together.

Actually, that third thing about Tyler just came to me right now, but by an astounding coincidence, I'd already forgotten the actual third thing I wanted to say, so it'll do in a pinch. Oh, wait, I do remember the third thing: I felt guilty later for making the Patriarchy work for me, because I'm afraid that doing so normalizes it. "No, my Husband doesn't want me to" is not a good reason, but it's one that society accepts. But in order to bring about social change, shouldn't I push back against that? Shouldn't I fight for my right to say "No, I don't want me to" and for that to be accepted? Yes, I should. But... there's only so many spoons in a day and sometimes I falter when it comes to my daily feminism. But I get back up the next day and try again. I really hope that's good enough to make a difference, but it's something I worry about.

   He continued through the room with his water drops. I put my cheek against the cool black tabletop and tried to hold on to my consciousness. All around me I could hear squeals, complaints, and giggles as my classmates skewered their fingers. I breathed slowly in and out through my mouth.
   "Bella, are you all right?" Mr. Banner asked. His voice was close to my head, and it sounded alarmed.
   "I already know my blood type, Mr. Banner," I said in a weak voice. I was afraid to raise my head. 
   "Are you feeling faint?"
   "Yes, sir," I muttered, internally kicking myself for not ditching when I had the chance.
   "Can someone take Bella to the nurse, please?" he called.

I really don't like Mr. Banner.

Later in the chapter, the school nurse will sagely note that there's at least one student who faints in Biology every year. (So I guess it is a yearly thing that Mr. Banner is doing here. Maybe the Red Cross has a schedule that they do not deviate from.) This implies a pattern: students are coming to Mr. Banner's class unprepared for blood drawing and fainting as a consequence. Knowing this, Mr. Banner has absolutely no excuse for his behavior here.

He should have alerted the students in advance that there would be blood drawn today, and let them opt out as needed, and not just catered to the Cullens on the side. He should have sent home permission forms for both the blood-drawing-in-class and the blood-drawing-for-donation in advance, if he wanted to raise consciousness for the blood drive. And he should have a contingency plan in place for when the One Every Year student feels faint, and it should be a better contingency plan than "do we have a volunteer in the audience?"

Next week, Mike is going to volunteer to take Bella out of the class, and Mr. Banner isn't (apparently) going to be concerned when Bella doesn't return for the rest of the day. Now, probably Mike isn't going to hurt Bella in any way, but Mr. Banner does not know that and it's really terribly irresponsible for him to put a weakened, fainting young woman in the care of the first boy in his class who volunteers to take her out of the class. So now I will end on the obligatory pun:

Mr. Banner, I don't like you when you're apathetic.


Twilight Life Enrichment Moment: After the Breaking Dawn movie, I dreamed that I was Edward. I distinctly remember sitting Bella down and giving her Self-Acceptance 101 (You kind, you smart, you important) with a heavy dose of Feminism 101 on the side, and Kristen Stewart's Bella staring at me intently as she took it all in. There's probably a dream interpretation book out there that can explain that one to me.

125 comments:

Brin Bellway said...

I've never been in a high school biology class (American or otherwise), nor have I ever done blood typing. The lack of alcohol wipes in this picture does seem pretty odd, though.

It's common knowledge in my family that Dad and Brother are A positive and Mom and I are O positive, but I don't know how this knowledge was obtained. It just exists.
Is this not a standard component of Family Knowledge-Osmosis Banks? I can see some people not knowing their blood type, but both Bella and Banner seem to think it's unusual that she does know. (I wouldn't expect them not to do blood typing just because everyone knows already. I'd want to do it anyway. It'd be neat to figure it out myself.)
(I was going to make this a footnote, but it's so much longer than the paragraph it sprouts from that people might forget to go back and read the other sentence.)

There's probably a dream interpretation book out there that can explain that one to me.

Wanting to improve Bella's self-esteem and bigotry awareness and stuff, so you do it in the way she's most likely to listen to?

depizan said...

My knowledge is a bit out of date, but we did blood typing in biology class when I was in high school and it wasn't a surprise (permission slips were probably involved, though its been long enough that I don't remember) and alcohol wipes were involved. And the teacher demonstrated on himself. Somehow I don't see those things changing.

I could buy that Bella's shock at the parking lot incident kept her usual blood reaction from happening, but it should have been mentioned. For most of my teens and twenties, I had trouble not fainting at the sight of blood, but I once drove a friend to the ER when he cut his hand badly. Someone had to drive and that seemed to override my fainting issues.

jp said...

I had to laugh at your story about Husband & the blood drive. I have a somewhat similar tale. Relative of mine had become (bizarrely, in my view) insistent that I needed to join Facebook. Raised the subject to me on SEVERAL occasions (again, weird, why does it matter so much?) and would not take my NO for an answer. I kept giving her my reasons (I'm kind of private, my job puts me in the public eye a bit already, I don't need another reason or venue to waste more time on the internet than I already do) but she would not give it up: You'd love it! It's so cool! We could keep in touch! Blah-blah-blah!

And just to make it clear, I am not hatin on the Facebookers here, I'm just saying, it's not for me. Which ought to be enough.

Finally, when she brought it up YET AGAIN, in sheer exasperation I told her (mournful expression) that if I went on FB I would be sure to encounter my ex (I'm coming off a seriously bad break-up, nearly 20 years together) in some way or other, or at least hear about him, since we have so many mutual friends who FB, and it's better for me to have no contact with him or information about him.

Have not heard a word about it since.

I have to laugh it off, but it exasperates me. My increasingly emphatic, "No thanks, sincerely not interested" had no impact whatsoever. But making my reasons ABOUT A GUY? THAT got her instant respect and compliance. And I think it does come down to patriarchalism: men, and the things that involve or pertain to them, are important; women, not so much.

You've also hit on why there's a side of me that feels skeevy about the whole thing. Oh, I know that as a cover story it makes me look like an emotional wimp (II must protect my delicate female fee-fees!), just as yours creates the impression that Husband calls the shots about what you can and cannot do. I was willing to create that impression just to stop the annoyance. But I suppose there is a kind of "Bad Feminism" involved.

Still, it worked; guess you have to pick your battles!

Ana Mardoll said...

Is this not a standard component of Family Knowledge-Osmosis Banks? I can see some people not knowing their blood type, but both Bella and Banner seem to think it's unusual that she does know. (I wouldn't expect them not to do blood typing just because everyone knows already. I'd want to do it anyway. It'd be neat to figure it out myself.)

I didn't know until last year, and I'm pretty sure that no one knows my Mom's type. Probably our family doctor could tell us, but it's not something that he's volunteered to us. (I actually don't know mine without looking it up where I wrote it down... hold on... Ah! I'm A positive, apparently. Now I'm disappointed; that seems so banal. I wanted to be O something.)

I just asked Husband if he knows HIS blood type and he said 'no'. I wonder why that is? I remember thinking it was strange that I *didn't* know when I had to check earlier in the year, but I've no idea.

Ana Mardoll said...

You've also hit on why there's a side of me that feels skeevy about the whole thing. Oh, I know that as a cover story it makes me look like an emotional wimp (II must protect my delicate female fee-fees!), just as yours creates the impression that Husband calls the shots about what you can and cannot do. I was willing to create that impression just to stop the annoyance. But I suppose there is a kind of "Bad Feminism" involved.

Still, it worked; guess you have to pick your battles!


Yes. This.

I agonized for days afterwards that the nurses would think I was "a doormat" or (worse) that they might think Husband was abusive. And THEN I agonized that I was helping the Patriarchy by reinforcing it. But there's only so much energy to fight all the battles, and the monthly "please donate blood" calls were getting to me.*

* Also because I got an automated "thank you" call after the first donation that was tales of people whose lives had been 'saved' by blood donation. One of the stories was several minutes of a woman talking about how much weight she'd lost since her chronic condition and how great she looked now that she was thinner and the whole thing WAS REALLY VERY TRIGGERING FOR ME in a way that startled me. So I was way out of mental-spoons at that point in the process anyway.

The other day, AT&T called asking me to get their Uverse television service. I try REALLY HARD to be nice to solicitors, so I explained to them that, no, we didn't want it. The person on the other line kept pushing harder and harder, and finally, I said "I wouldn't be able to make this decision anyway without talking to my husband." And then the other person sort of got this superior tone of voice and said, "Oh, I'll call back when I can talk to someone who can make a decision," or something to that effect.

I thought it was annoying-but-hilarious, because Husband WILL NOT talk to solicitors, so I was thinking "good luck with that!" However, Dad theorized that the gibe was meant to needle me into insisting that I COULD TOO make a decision and I wanted Uverse NOW. I'm not sure I'm convinced by that, though.

Ben said...

I think knowing your blood type is actually rarer than everyone believes, but people who do know their blood type generally treat it like knowing their eye color.

"Yes, I just look in the mirror and see my blood type written on my forehead. Don't you?"

Bayley G said...

I haven't the faintest idea what my blood type is. It's probably somewhere in the medical paperwork I hoarde in case of emergency, though. I'm terrified I or my fiancee will get hurt in an accident and be unconscious and thus unable to tell the paramedics/nurses/doctors/whoever to tell the other one what happened so I'll be sitting around *not knowing*....

Anyway, Twilight. (Can you tell I'm home alone today?)

My personal theory is that the Cullens follow modified rules strictly because it helps reinforce the big Modified Yet Unbreakable Rule: You can drink blood, but ONLY from approved sources, like animals or donated blood. No humans. The more they stick to other rules, the easier it is to uphold that one.

regarding using a man as a shield: I dropped my car off last night so the insurance people could assess the damage and send it to an approved mechanic. I walked in initially alone, as my fiancee had driven separately, and engaged the man behind the counter. We had a chat, I sent my fiancee to get things out of my car, we looked at the damage, I recounted the tale of the accident, all in all the guy was pleasant and pretty awesome. The conversation turned to my fiancee's car and his rusted running boards, and the guy volunteered to take a look at them and give us some advice. Naturally, at this point, he ended up having some conversation with my fiancee, since it was his car.

As soon as he directly engaged him, he continued talking to him first and me as an afterthought for the rest of the conversation. It was odd having him thank my fiancee for coming in and tell him that they'd be in touch with the estimate for... MY car. But he only glanced at me occasionally, focused on him, shook his hand first... it was the weirdest thing.

Akedhi said...

I would absolutely buy that the gibe was meant to pressure you into saying that you could too make a decision about the product, because I have done telephone soliciting as a desperate attempt to have a job of some kind, and that kind of gross manipulation is actually part of the training. I didn't stay long, because I couldn't manage to buy into the not quite lies (not that they were explicitly false, either, but deception is a part of what one has to do to make the quotas that keep one employed at such a job) and my sales suffered for my qualms.

keri said...

It was the strangest sensation; I felt like I could feel the blood leaving my body, and it was not at all pleasant.

I know that feeling! I have had to have my blood sucked out of my veins for testing fairly regularly for my entire life due to various medical conditions, and wow I know that feeling intimately. I don't have any problems with needles or injections or the process of removing the blood, so it's not discomfort or phobia of that kind. It's incredibly unpleasant and usually makes me feel faint, or like I'm going to throw up (or both!). The techs usually blame it on having (1) small veins and (2) wiggly veins, so it's difficult to get the needle in just right, but then they say a butterfly needle will be better and it's actually worse. I've even done experiments by having them pick at random while I'm looking away so that I can't see what kind of instrument is being used, and most of the time, the butterfly needle was worse (it also took longer). The last series of tests, the tech used a butterfly needle meant for young children, and it actually wasn't so bad (it had a shorter tube, too), but I could still feel the suctioning and it wasn't something I looked forward to repeating.

Long story short: I had no idea this was a Condition. I've always felt a bit guilty for not donating blood because of it, like I'm just a wimp, but I have the most common blood type anyway.

Ruby_Tea said...

I attended American high schools in the 1990s, and never had any kind of blood testing in class. I really can't imagine such a thing being done without a mountain of permission slips and kids trying to get out of it for a variety of reasons (including, but not limited to, fainting).

And I get that SMeyer likes to use poor Mike for comic relief (if you can call humiliation "comic relief"), but there is no way a teacher would randomly poke a kid to draw blood, without warning. And if it did, that teacher would most likely be in Big Trouble from multiple sources.

Ana Mardoll said...

I would absolutely buy that the gibe was meant to pressure you into saying that you could too make a decision about the product,

Huh! Well, I'll have to tell Dad he was right. It's so odd, though -- I would never respond that way, like, "oh, yeah, I can TOO make the decision," so I never would have guessed that. If anything, I'm almost relieved, like, "yes, I'm powerless, get off my phone line now."

I had a friend in college who worked solicitations and she was miserable. I always try to be super nice to the callers; I know it's a dreadful job. :(

Ana Mardoll said...

Long story short: I had no idea this was a Condition. I've always felt a bit guilty for not donating blood because of it, like I'm just a wimp, but I have the most common blood type anyway.

Yes! It totally is. I thought I was wimpy, too, but no, Dad has it and the nurse confirmed it was a Condition. (I wish I could remember the name.)

Though it's odd that it took a nurse telling my Dad for me to find out -- it's always hurt me in much the same way, but no one ever volunteered that it might be anything other that wimpyness on my part...

mmy said...

Just a brief look-in--I am semi out-of-commission getting medical "stuff" done.

TRIGGER WARNING: MEDICAL PROCEDURE STUFF

I am sitting with an experienced IV specialist who asks me before starting the IV if I am one of those people who sometimes bleeds quite a bit before clotting starts. "Yup," I respond.

Knowing this she very, very carefully sticks me for the IV. I was having "not clotting day" and the small prick to start the IV resulted in blood covering my hand, the arm of the IV chair and dripping to the floor. The nurse was gloved up for the prick. Every time she got a new alcohol swab she washed her hands and regloved. She didn't let me leave the chair till the bleeding stopped and then walked me to the room where I was to wait for the next stage of the procedure and made sure there was someone there with me.

She was not unduly surprised. It happens with a known percentage of people. Sometimes they can't get any blood at all and sometimes I bleed, and bleed, and bleed. From a prick so small that other people have to squeeze to get blood from it.

So, not only was the high school teacher putting the students in danger of blood born disease contamination he was also putting at risk any student who, like me, sometimes bleeds excessively from small pricks.

Kit Whitfield said...

And if we're meant to read it that way -- and I think we possibly are -- it may be the first thing Edward has said that I sort of like. Edward isn't an innocent -- he's a smug jerk and a murderer several times over -- but he seems to be caught in an existential net of self-loathing, and as Robert Pattinson has reminded us, that can go a long way toward covering over a multitude of sins.

I think this may be a big part of his appeal; to a naive young woman, there are few things more compelling than a man who seems to be down on himself. Cheering him up looks like it'd be easy, and it'd make you so special, and it'd be so romantic...! It's only experience that teaches you that if someone has a habit of being down on himself, he's either got, at best, self-esteem problems that only he can fix, and possibly a mood disorder, or else he really does have good reason to be down on himself because he does bad things.

I remember seeing an interview clip with Robert Pattinson, for instance, where he said he could identify with Edward's self-hatred. He said something to the effect that he knew what it was like to react to someone's interest by thinking, 'Don't like me, I'm a dick!' And it was interesting: my inner nurturer - the one women get dinned into them - immediately said, 'Oh, I'm sure you're not...' But then my adult brain said, 'Well, y'know, he knows himself and I don't. Maybe he is a dick. People are, sometimes. Or if he's not a dick and thinks he is, then his bad self-image is clearly resistant to observable reality, so nothing I say is going to get through it.' I should stress that I don't know if Mr Pattinson actually is a dick or really thinks he is, or if he was just saying it as part of his interview performance, and as I don't know him it's really none of my business anyway. I just found it interesting listening to a conversation between my fourteen-year-old self and my thirty-four-year-old self. They had opposite reactions: the younger one was saying, 'Hey, go cheer him up!' and the older one was saying 'Run away!'

--

There's a reason why it's useful to know your blood type beyond donation drives: if a Rhesus negative woman is carrying a Rhesus positive foetus, her immune system gets all antsy about it. You can carry one Rh-pos baby to term successfully, but after that your system is permanently primed against it and you're looking at a lot of miscarriages and/or stillbirths. Horrible thing, fortunately preventable in modern culture with a simple injection course: one when pregnant, one after the baby's born. The midwife I saw said it was one of her favourite jobs, because it's such a straightforward way of preventing something so very bad.

I know this because I'm Rhesus negative, so I had to have the shot. (Which was pretty ouchie, but a lot better than not having it, especially as it turned out my son was positive). So it's a useful thing for a girl to learn.

Also a useful thing for a boy to learn in case he winds up with a Rh-neg partner, but to a lesser extent. I told the doctor I was Rh-neg and said that we could get my husband tested but I wouldn't mind having the shots just in case, and she laughed and said, 'Oh, we'd give you the shots anyway. We have to be very cynical.'

So actually a blood-test in biology class could be a useful part of sex education if someone was designing a sensible course on it. Probably not what's happening here, of course...

Ana Mardoll said...

Blood drives will type the donated blood anyway, since self-reported blood types are bound to be inaccurate. Also, they're perfectly happy to tell you your blood type afterwards, or at least that was my sibling's blood-donation experience. So this lab is nothing but marketing for the Port Angeles blood drive.

How did I not notice this?! Ha, you're absolutely right. MISTER BANNER SUX. :D

chris the cynic said...

I think you could make an argument for Edward being "not bad" in the sense that he's (at least currently) trying really hard not to be a murderer. I'm not going to give him a cookie for that right now, but it's a start.

John Oliver, on fair trade goods of all things:
It seems sad that we are rewarding fundamental decency with its own label. I, for instance, have never killed anyone. Where's my special sticker?

-

In all of my time in science classes, high school and otherwise, the most invasive thing we've ever had to do to our bodies was that once upon a time we looked at our own hair under a microscope, which required each student to remove a strand of hair from their head. Having to bleed for a highschool science class is very far removed from my experience.

I too would like to know why Bella, and Edward for that matter, had no problems with Tyler in his bloodiness.

Ana Mardoll said...

@Mmy: *offers hugs*

@Kit, I'd forgotten about Rhesus stuff. How does one find out what they are, I wonder? I don't recall the blood drive people telling me that.

@Chris, from The Daily Show? I love John Oliver on that show.

keri said...

You know, I can almost see this lab not as Banner saying "here, test for your blood type and then go donate" but "The school has been abuzz about the blood donation drive in Port Angeles, and I know it's one of the major feel-good things you kids participate in every year. Therefore, in order to tie your interests into biology, we're going to learn about blood types and how the tests work that differentiate them. Also, since the school will be taking a bus out for the donation drive, here is a permission slip for the under-18ers who want to come along."

Unfortunately, about 75% of that was left out, and the lack of warning about the lab and the lack of proper precautions makes it highly suspect. The only way it would work would be Bella retelling the story for maximum drama and leaving out the bits she didn't care to mention/didn't recall - like Banner asking for a volunteer to be an example and Mike offering to be the first prick. But that's the case for the entire series, and I seem to recall a discussion that ultimately agreed to not use this explanation for everything.

We did have major blood donation drives like that at my high school, and they would even bring the FLGA Blood Bus to our campus for a day in the spring. In my religion class (Catholic school) one year, the teacher used it as an excuse to talk about ... I don't even remember exactly, but it was something to do with blood and myth and superstitions and how that played into the history of the Church.

Ana Mardoll said...

I just found it interesting listening to a conversation between my fourteen-year-old self and my thirty-four-year-old self. They had opposite reactions: the younger one was saying, 'Hey, go cheer him up!' and the older one was saying 'Run away!'

I've had this exact same conversation with myself, but not about Robert Pattinson. It's a strange sensation. I'd love to understand better how I was socialized into being nurturing and forgiving at such a young age... I wonder, too, if it wasn't a sort of Improvement Fail: for the longest time I assumed that if someone KNEW they were a dick, knowing was half the battle and they'd... get better. It took a long time to realize that, no, not everyone is actively trying to "improve" oneself.

Dezster said...

I went earlier in the year to our employee blood donation center because I needed my blood type (and donating was cheaper than going to my doctor to find out, which would have been expensive) and I did all the "right" stuff beforehand, but it was incredibly painful and I just about fainted in the chair from the pain. It was the strangest sensation; I felt like I could feel the blood leaving my body, and it was not at all pleasant.

This, this, this!!! I tried to go donate blood for the first time with a bunch of friends a couple years ago in my second year of university. When I got into the chair, I got hooked up, and the needle hurt in my arm! I mentioned to the nurses that the needle hurt. They tried to adjust it and it felt better, but still painful. I could totally feel the blood actually leaving my body and then about 30 seconds later, I fainted. It was terrifying not only for me, but for my friends. I most definitely did all the right stuff before going, like drinking lots of water and stuff, so I had no idea why it had happened. I didn't know this was an actual condition and I always felt like a loser being afraid to go give blood again for fear of fainting again. I felt like a huge wuss. At least now I know that it's not just me being a wuss. I, too, wish you could remember the name of the Condition, I like to research stuff like that (being a biology major and all that). I thankfully never got any calls to come back, since they ended up yanking the needle out while I was unconscious and I didn't get to fill the bag, so I didn't actually get to donate or find out my blood type, which was the main reason I ended up wanting to go.

Ana Mardoll said...

OK, I *think* it might be called a "Vasovagal response".

Among people with vasovagal episodes, the episodes are typically recurrent, usually happening when the person is exposed to a specific trigger. Prior to losing consciousness, the individual frequently experiences a prodrome of symptoms such as lightheadedness, nausea, the feeling of being extremely hot (accompanied by sweating), ringing in the ears (tinnitus), uncomfortable feeling in the heart, fuzzy thoughts, a slight inability to speak/form words (sometimes combined with mild stuttering), weakness and visual disturbances such as lights seeming too bright, fuzzy or tunnel vision, and sometimes a feeling of nervousness can occur as well. These last for at least a few seconds before consciousness is lost (if it is lost), which typically happens when the person is sitting up or standing. When sufferers pass out, they fall down (unless this is impeded); and when in this position, effective blood flow to the brain is immediately restored, allowing the person to wake up. Short of fainting a person may experience an almost indescribable weak and tired feeling resulting from a lack of oxygen to the brain due to a sudden drop in blood pressure. Taber's Cyclopedic Medical Dictionary[3] describes this as the "feeling of impending death" caused by expansion of the aorta, drawing blood from the head and upper body.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasovagal_response

Vasovagal sensations (e.g., dizziness, nausea, and fainting) are one of the main reasons people find blood donation unpleasant.

http://bmo.sagepub.com/content/34/2/164.abstract

If you actually faint, it's called Vasovagal Syncope: http://www.mdguidelines.com/vasovagal-syncope

And apparently some REALLY severe versions of the reaction (plus the fear OF the reaction which is called "needle phobia" even though people fear the vasovagal response and not the needle itself) can actually *kill* you, which means it should be criminal that they don't tell people this when they give blood and have reaction problems.

In cases of severe trypanophobia, the drop in blood pressure caused by the vasovagal shock reflex may cause death. In Dr. Hamilton's 1995 review article on needle phobia, he was able to document 23 deaths as a direct result of vasovagal shock during a needle procedure.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trypanophobia#Vasovagal

Akedhi said...

I... honestly can't remember if anyone I tried that on actually did respond in the way the people who told me to do it said they would - I'm also drawing a blank on whether I actually succeeded in remembering to do it, because as I said, the blatantly manipulative tactics we were told to use left a pretty bad taste in my mouth and one either has to be okay with those or actually believe in one's pitch to succeed in cold call sales, the latter of which I managed briefly, the former never.

keri said...

Yikes, that's kind of scary to read - especially the "ways to treat/prevent the Vasovagal response" section - almost all of them can't be done when the whole reason for venipuncture is to procure blood for medical testing - things like eating/drinking certain foods or lying down (unless you have an awesome lab equipped with a lounge instead of an uncomfortable plastic chair in a relatively cramped space).

A lot of it the discussion seems to consider the response to be somewhat psychosomatic, if I'm reading it right, by focusing on folks who have developed the needle phobia response after a previous Vasovagal experience. I like the idea of desensitizing to the life-threatening response by...experiencing it more often.

Ana Mardoll said...

Yeah, I'm a little irked by how much of the literature seems to be STARTING from the standpoint that it's psychosomatic. I'm reasonably certain that in my case I went to give blood when I was 13 figuring that "this won't hurt a bit" and they had to catch me before I hit the floor.

I realize that the mind has influence over physical processes, but that doesn't mean that all physical processes have a mental cause. A lot of the vasovagal response stuff out there reads like what the nurses were telling me -- that if I just TRY HARDER, then it won't be a problem. Blood drives and bootstraps, as it were. :/

chris the cynic said...

It's the John Oliver from the Daily Show, but it's actually from a stand-up thing he did called "Terrifying Times" which is entirely hilarious.

graylor said...

Add me to the list of people who don't know their blood type. I guess it's probably in my medical records somewhere but no one ever told me and we certainly didn't test for it in biology class. I think we may have done... something with saliva? Alas, what I remember most about sophmore biology is learning the mechniacs of trees changing color. Very useful information, that. ;-p

I can kind of see Mr. Banner sending someone off with Bella rather than taking her to the nurse's office himself--I know I wouldn't want to leave a classroom full of teenagers unsupervised with sharp objects. When I swooned (not as much fun as Victorian maidens would imply) my teacher just sent another student to make sure I was okay, and all we were doing was watching a video. Either Mrs. F was a bit jaded or the need to supervise the classroom at all times outweighed the needs of the one. She was quite kind about it afterwards, though. There was never any question of 'toughening me up' by forcing me to participate in the dissections, though possibly because having someone who faints at the sight of blood cells moving through capillaries (?) possibly fainting while holding sharp objects around other people with sharp objects just sounds like a lawsuit waiting to happen.

Redwood Rhiadra said...

I know we didn't do any blood typing labs in my high school - I really can't imagine any high school in the AIDS era taking the risk (and the potential lawsuits!). Someone mentioned using their hair for study under a microscope - we used a swab to get some cheek cells for that, but that was the only time we used our own tissue for anything.

I was wondering if perhaps Ms. Meyer had gone to school in an earlier time, but it turns out she's only a couple of years older than me...

kitryan said...

I have often fainted when blood was drawn or when watching/hearing extensive related stuff. It doesn't, for me, link with any physical discomfort and appears to be a vasovagal syncope that is, in my case, psychosomatic. First time was when we were getting a lecture about leeches on a field trip (4th grade). I got woozy and fell down unconscious. Similar events occurred when losing a baby tooth and getting blood drawn for medical tests. If I'm sufficiently desensitized (having blood drawn hourly for 5hrs for a hypoglycemia test) or sufficiently distracted (I bring a book and read it while they do the blood draw), nothing happens. I do always lie down, as I'll slide right out of those chairs and no office wants the liability :)
I can't give blood. When I tried, after a long period of no fainting, the prick they did to test for anemia got me all focused on the upcoming draw and I got dizzy and then they wouldn't take my blood. It's not impossible for me, but I'm just going to get in the way being all dizzy and faint and requiring a lot of attention that could be better spent getting other people's blood.

Amarie said...

Derailing a little here…

Maybe Mr. Banner’s negligence is representative of yet another theme in Twilight? That is, the abdication of authority? I don’t know if it’s just me, but there seems to be a…resentment of authority figures in the text. Maybe even a hatred.

I say that because the text clearly shows that Mr. Banner’s [in]actions are perfectly normal and certified. In fact, his negligence is a driving force in the current plot, and that current plot is for Bella to (once again) become physically incapable to handle herself. Cue Big White Alpha Men to come and *literally* carry her and fight over her.

So, you just get the feeling that if Mr. Banner *had* done his job well, then the text would explicitly state that his actions are unnecessarily and rudely invasive. And I think that’s because if there *is* an authority figure that does their job and does their job *well*, then that means that Edward can’t step in and act out one of his greatest appeals, and that is simultaneously being a father and a lover. In Breaking Dawn, the cycle continues with Jacob and Nessie; that is, Edward and Bella *appear* to (understandably) be distraught over the fact that they’re daughter is pretty much going to be child groomed. Yet, at the same time, they take no true action to *show* that they are distressed (i.e, forcibly separating Jacob from Nessie, at least until she’s mature). And their failure as protective parents allows Jacob, like Edward, to act as both father and sexual partner.

But the theory of the text resenting/hating authority figures might not make sense because that means that, in some context, spouses/boyfriends are authority figures. Yet, at the same time, you *could* argue that that’s alright because one of the jobs of someone in authority is to protect you. And as far as Twilight is concerned, the only real protection that a female needs has to do with her hymen because a woman is defined only in terms of sexuality/virginity.

So, I suppose that with that theory…Charlie is an excellent father…

graylor said...

Thinking back on it, it's odd that Mike winds up with shepherding Bella duty. What if she detoured into the bathroom because of nausea? The whole situation is awkward enough without having a guy in the girl's room (or vice versa). I suppose it's to push along the romantic angle, and of course, Bella must be physically supported by male characters as often as possible, but it just reads... oddly to me.

darchildre said...

Re: the Port Angeles blood drive.

My mom actually works for the Puget Sound Blood Center and their mobile units totally do blood drives in Forks. No need to drive all the way to Port Angeles - just wait for the next one in your hometown.

(And they'd have called 911 had anyone reacted to being stuck the way Bella did. Not that Bella actually got stuck, but fainting while giving blood is a Big Deal and warrants an ambulance call.)

chris the cynic said...

I was thinking that Angela would have been a better choice.

Arresi said...

I feel kinda bad - Ana's (and jp's) story is bringing out the mad social scientist in me. I want to find the other people involved and run alternative scenarios past them, just to see what they do. Like, if Ana's husband did the same thing, would they just accept that he wasn't going to donate? Would talking about his wife stop them? If Ana or another woman mentioned their mother, sister, or girlfriend, would that work as well as a husband?

depizan said...

That Rh business is why my dad is an only child. He was born at a time when they knew the problem, but the solution hadn't been developed yet.

Back on the blood typing, even though we did that lab in high school (and I've had all kinds of fun medical issues), I have no idea what my blood type is.

Cupcakedoll said...

O_o In this class they actually have to stab with a stabby thing? Where are the little rectangular boxes that you push on your finger and it bites you and gets a drop of blood that way with no stabbyness? Any diabetics on here will probably know what I'm talking about but I only see them when I give blood, they use one to draw a drop to make sure you have enough iron in your blood.

Nobody in my house ever did blood testing in school, but it has appeared in a couple of books and the scene is always a danger of exposure for a supernatural creature. I'm thinking of Owl in Love and The Replacement. Maybe Ms. Meyer read books like that and assumed real classes did it because the fictional classes did.

Also O_o at the heartwrenching thanks-for-your-blood phone call. I think the attempted guilt trip would creep me out rather than make me want to donate again. Besides, is it even real stories? What about confidentiality? Our local place just gives away raffles and gift certificates and sometimes free ice cream.

I didn't realize there were so many people who couldn't give blood. I'll donate a pint in your names next time I've got a day free! =)

sekushinonyanko said...

Brian Kinney in the US version of Queer as Folk said "it's not lying if they make you lie" in reference to the morality of lying about being straight to avoid bigotry. I feel like it's a similar thing with making use of Patriarchy Approved Methods. It would have been funny if you'd said "I don't want to run into my ex" and when they said "you poor thing, I completely understand" you said "actually **** you, that's a lie. The heck is wrong with you that you would only care what I want if I bring a man into it, much less one I'm not even still with?! Quit being such a handmaiden of the patriarchy and ovary up!"

I don't think you have an Obligation as a Feminist Woman to do so, but I suppose it would be amusing and pretty likely stop further back and forth on the subject. If you're playing a game with someone that's cheating and stacked the deck I think it would be a bit odd to criticize you for playing the game the same way the other players are. That's like saying "well sure he brought a gun to the fight and you have a knife, but have some honor! Don't go killing someone from across the room just cause he's willing to. Duel properly you naughty kitten!"

sekushinonyanko said...

Oh boy that interpretation is fun. Have a little Rebellion young lady! Buy some Uverse. Show your husband you do what you want to do! Saying it's some sort of rebellion is a time-honored way of getting people to buy things.

sekushinonyanko said...

I think that might be largely because you are a Lady and most Lady Problems are caused by innate deficiencies of Ladydom. For example it's commonly assumed that women that have anemia are anemic because of their periods. But actually in like 70% of the cases they pass off that way it's because of something else, they just don't bother to test and see because they just figure it's feminine frailty.

Ana Mardoll said...

I have these impulses as well, Arresi. :)

Nathaniel said...

"Edward will later confirm that every guy in the school was lusting after her fervently on her first day."

Gah. Talk about pure fantasy. And not the has-dragons type either.

"Third, while I feel like this Bella-faints-at-the-sight-of-blood characterization is perfectly valid, I would like very much to know where this detail was during The Parking Lot Incident when Tyler was bleeding profusely from the face and neck and they were in the same hospital room together."

Ana has described Twilight as dream-like. The constant forgetting of inconvenient facts is a perfect fit in this regard. It works fine in a personal dream. But I find it bloody annoying when reading a novel.

Ana Mardoll said...

Oh boy that interpretation is fun. Have a little Rebellion young lady! Buy some Uverse. Show your husband you do what you want to do! Saying it's some sort of rebellion is a time-honored way of getting people to buy things.

Ha, yeah, that was how Dad framed it. Alas for the solicitor, I'm less of a Rebel and more of an Anarcho-Syndicalist-Commune kind of person, and there's no place for Uverse there. (DirecTV, on the other hand, is more than welcome.)

Ana Mardoll said...

I wondered that as well. Although I should reiterate that Dad went over a dozen times before a nurse told him that maybe there was a reason this wasn't working for him. I didn't stick with it that long.

But, still, yeah, having Dad faint on you would be a little less stereotypical than, say, having Lady-Bits Mardoll faint on you.

Ana Mardoll said...

Someone did point out to me later in conversation that maybe it's less BLOOD MAKES BELLA FAINT and instead a more specific phobia, like "drawing blood makes Bella faint" (in which case Tyler's injuries wouldn't count) or the presence of needles.

That's possible -- some people have a phobia of water but only under certain conditions, for instance.

But, yeah, I REALLY would have liked this to have at least come up in passing when we were in the hospital. Or, well... EVER AGAIN, since Bella will be very bloody later on in the novel...

Gelliebean said...

Not really intended to solve the issues present in the passage - mostly because it relies on them not being 'vegetarian' vampires - but this thought gave me the giggles....

Edward Cullen lay across the sofa, propped up by a couple of ruffled pillows under his head. Esme had made him take his shoes off before she'd allow him into the living room, and then had brought him a box of tissues and a soft blanket. The blanket hadn't done much good considering that his body temperature never fluctuated away from its normal 70 degrees, but Edward appreciated the thought anyway. The box of tissues was already nearly half-empty.

He closed his eyes and listened to the comforting hum of activity around the house: Alice's quick, light footsteps in her bedroom above; Esme rattling measuring spoons in the kitchen and singing quietly to herself; the sound of a car engine coming up the drive -

Oh, crap.

The engine cut off, the car door opened and shut, and footsteps came up the gravel walkway. The front door opened and Carlisle swept in, depositing his jacket on the coat rack in the entryway.

Edward shrank down into the cushions and held perfectly still, but his feet, still clad in white socks, stuck out past the edge of the sofa and gave him away. Carlisle came into the living room, dropped his bag on the floor next to the tissues and crouched down.

"Why do you have to be so impatient, son?"

"I dote doe..." Edward snorted into a fresh tissue and tossed it in the small wastebasket next to its fellows. His voice was rough and scratchy.

"I just convinced Mr. Banner yesterday to run a blood-typing lab on your classmates. I told him that with the Red Cross drive coming up next week, it would be a perfect opportunity to tie some science into volunteering. Couldn't you just have waited until the lab was finished?"

"Yeah, but...."

"And if you'd waited, you would have known that Eric was AB negative and you could have avoided him."

"Yeah, but...."

Carlisle sighed. "Well, you'll just have to tough it out now. If you were one of my human patients, I could give you a cortisol shot, but I'm not in the mood to break six needles trying. I'll call your principal and let him know you'll be out sick tomorrow."

hapax said...

I don't remember ever NOT knowing my blood type, but we certainly didn't do that experiment in school. I was rather surprised to find out my children didn't know their types (I did).

All the women in my family have vasovagal syncope. I've got it relatively light -- I do give blood, whenever I've got enough iron that they'll take it -- but sister and niece are so bad that they have to wear MedAlert bracelets, and they actually took away sister's drivers license for a year, out of fear that she'd pass out while driving. I just insist on lying down and drinking orange juice constantly while donating, and I'm usually okay.

(I like to give, because I'm O+ and that's always in demand. I certainly don't condemn anyone who can't or chooses not to!)

***

However, I thought that it was obvious why Banner didn't volunteer his own blood. He couldn't let anyone suspect all the gamma radiation, after all.

Ana Mardoll said...

Ha! I love this so much, especially Carlisle's parting line! :D

Ana Mardoll said...

Maybe that's why he is so adamant that the students donate, because it deflects attention from him.

I find myself wondering if Meyer is a comics fan? Mr Banner is just such a delightful coincidence after the Bruce Wayne / Peter Parker discussion. And he teaches science lab!

Lunch Meat said...

I tried to give blood when I was in high school, but I have the small/wiggly veins that my mom has and they didn't have the right kind of needle that would fit. I feel bad that I've never been brave enough to try again, but I have a very low pain threshold--just getting poked for a shot is very unpleasant to me. I've only had one "good" experience with a needle, and that was when I got my wisdom teeth out. I told the technician that people have trouble finding my veins, and he said, "Oh, that's just because they didn't know how to do it right" and put it in perfectly first try.

As someone who goes door to door (though not to sell things--thank goodness!) thank you to everyone who is nice to solicitors and those who go door to door. The people I talk to tend to forget that I'm a person too, even though they don't like what I do. I actually like my job--I work for Texas Campaign for the Environment. I don't have to go door to door; I could find a decent office job, but the work that we do is important and rewarding. But I definitely wouldn't be doing it if we used manipulative tactics. We're trained to be very straightforward: At the beginning of a conversation, we say "We're fundraising," and repeat that two or three more times during the conversation before actually asking someone for money. If at any time someone says they don't want to give or they aren't interested, we say "Thank you for your time" and leave. We make it clear what we need, but don't pressure anyone into doing something they don't want to.

Interestingly, I get a lot of wives early in the afternoon who say they can't do anything without asking their husbands (only ever had one husband say the same thing), and I'm sure that at least some of them just don't know how to be assertive and tell me to go away. Which is funny to me, because I'd leave if they told me to, whatever the reason.

Naomi said...

I am amazed that the "my husband won't let me" card actually worked. The Red Cross called me for YEARS trying to get me to donate again...even though every single time my response was, "I have been permanently deferred due to certain travels in the 1980s that may have exposed me to Mad Cow disease. Please don't call me again!"

Every time, they would apologize and tell me they'd take me out of the donor database, but a couple of months later, they'd call again.

swanblood said...

"The whole Bella/Edward romance could be shown as a destined-lovers who see each other across a room and know in that instant that they are meant for each other. But the impression I've been getting from the movies -- or, rather, from the third movie, to be specific -- is that the situation is less of destined love and more of destined being. There's something about how Bella is portrayed on the screen that makes me feel like she's being presented as a fish-out-of-water story where the problem with her environment is that she's a vampire in a human's body."

I have to skip to the end of this post before I even finish reading it to say: as someone who identifies therian (literally, not human in a human's body), this made me smile so much. And I really hope you do keep showing this perspective through these reviews. It will make this swangirl (no, not Bella) really happy. ^v^

Makabit said...

I don't mind blood, but have a very hard time with needles, and specific injection phobias aren't uncommon.

Makabit said...

And unless this is just the crap you can get away with in a small, rural, badly run school district, this scenario is wildly unrealistic. The teachers at the schools I've worked at would simply never, ever do this. There aren't enough permission slips in the world.

Of course, you hear insane stories, like that guy who used a Tesla coil to brand a student with a cross in class, so it's possible that Mr. Banner is just taking advantage of the fact that no one in Forks is savyy or energetic enough to care what he's doing in class.

Makabit said...

This brings up a memory of being told (at a college fencing meet) by the other team's coach, that menstrual cramps were entirely psychosomatic. Back when I was a wee slip of a girl, I used to hurt so much it would bring me to my knees, sweating and swearing and blurry vision and all, and I once got off a bus to throw up.

What interests me, looking back, is that no one cared. I was told to take Midol, and use a heating pad. My folks would give me a slip to come home if it was bad enough. Somehow, no one ever thought to check me for anything, or put me on the pill--which is what finally put a stop to these every-forty-five-day-or-so disasters. I think everyone simply assumed it was mild cramping which I was making a fuss over.

I had no idea I was angry about this, BTW.

Kit Whitfield said...

I'd forgotten about Rhesus stuff. How does one find out what they are, I wonder? I don't recall the blood drive people telling me that.

Well, I got told when I gave blood; you could ask to be told your blood type, and I knew my mother was negative so I wanted to know. But also, at least in the UK, you get a blood test when you're about three months pregnant. They test for Rhesus, HIV, hepatitis, syphilis, sickle cell (no matter what your race, presumably on the logic that just because you don't look African, that doesn't mean none of your ancestors were) and anaemia. Basically there's a whole raft of conditions that would require some sort of treatment and they check for them relatively early.

Léa said...

I (a Singaporean) had this sort of lab; we were not told in advance, but alcohol wipes were mandatory, and only students who volunteered would be involved in the actual lancet-pricking. The last takes care of anyone having any conditions whatsoever, whether haemophilia (I had a classmate with this), or a low pain threshold (*says Aye*), or just plain squick.

Another reason why pushing blood drives on students is Not Right: it's exclusive. Lots of people want to give blood but can't, or can't give blood and don't want to - whether because they have health issues, or spent more than two years in the UK, or - and this is particularly slut-shaming and -ist if the blood donation is a high-profile public event - have had more than the prescribed number of sexual encounters, or with a partner of the same sex. Very uncomfortable for the students involved, and thus it's just not proper to pressure students to give blood (it's a coercive situation, people!).

GeniusLemur said...

I've given blood many times, and they have several things they make you read (and certify you've read) that explain exactly what they'll do and exactly what the risks are, which include cardiac arrest. So for all the people with conditions that make it unpleasant or dangerous, they do at least warn you.

Lea made an interesting point about the pressure to give. The way donation used to work (they don't do it this way anymore for me, but I always go to the center to give: they might still do it at blood drives) was that you'd get two stickers, one for "Use my blood" and one for "Don't use my blood," and you'd privately pick one and put it on the bag. I once asked why anyone would go to the trouble, yet mark their blood "Don't use," and the employee said it was for people who feel pressure to donate, but know they shouldn't.

You could make the case that the alcohol wipe and permission slips were skipped as uninteresting details (even if this leaves the dangling thread of Bella not knowing about it), but the text is clear ("He GRABBED Mike's hand and JABBED the spike") that Banner's drawing blood violently, without warning and being incredibly irresponsible doing it. The only way I can see this scene being even remotely realistic is if SMeyer is using exactly the wrong words to describe what Banner's doing, i.e., is a bad writer.

But still, I'm sure the point is to make Bella all frail and helpless, so mission accomplished there.

mmy said...

But also, at least in the UK, you get a blood test when you're about three months pregnant. They test for Rhesus, HIV, hepatitis, syphilis, sickle cell (no matter what your race, presumably on the logic that just because you don't look African, that doesn't mean none of your ancestors were) and anaemia.

I just checked to see what the regional health centres here (in Ontario) describe as routine tests during pregnancy. -- For those in the US, these are all tests that are done for free.

Among other things they test for Hemoglobin, Blood Group and Antibody Screen (this is where they catch the Rh Factor), Rubella immunity, Hepatitis B, VDRL, HIV Test and a whole raft of other tests are routine for the first "I am pregnant" visit to the lab. There are a number of others that come later or if the age, life-conditions of the mother warrant them.

For various reasons I have been getting my blood tested very frequently in the last few months and there is almost always at least one woman with that "scared/glowing" look of the first-time pregnant. The health centres encourage frequent and early testing because it saves money/heartbreak to catch things early.

Also--in our area we have a large community of Mennonites and they may not use a lot of modern inventions but they do use the medical labs. There is usually a couple in the waiting room when you arrive at the lab.

Ana Mardoll said...

Thank you Swanblood -- I'm very glad that I made you smile, and I hope I keep a broad perspective going forward, too! (I may need all of ya'll to keep me on that so I don't slip up.) :)

Asha said...

Is there any indication how long Mr. Banner has been a teacher? As someone coming from a small-ish country town, you occasionally get teachers who really don't want to teach or are just incompetent, or are hired as coaches but they have to teach anyways. If he had a 'brilliant' idea, and chose to do it out of the blue..?

As for blood donation, I've been donating since high school and it has been different every single time. My college had blood drives regularly, my work had blood drives, and I've always felt compelled to donate because I'm 0- (the universal donor.) For me, the skill of the one doing the sticking is the biggest factor. I had a doctor one time completely miss and then have to jab other random places (resulting in blood spurting out), and I've had nurses who were so good I could barely feel it. Once I grayed out because I was so used to getting up and going on with the rest of the day that I forgot I was putting on a backpack that weighed about ten pounds. The last time time I got blood drawn it hurt badly- the first time it had hurt to the point of me almost complaining. (Machismo, I guess. I feel that I must not speak.) Left an interesting smiley face bruise, too. I had never heard that a bad reaction to blood being drawn could lead to death- that's frightening. I was also surprised to hear that people had so much trouble donating. Most of the people I've known have usually had good experiences doing so.

When it comes to saying no to solicitors, I was told that if you ask for the solicitor's info and then request they remove your name from their list, you can possibly sue? I've tried it before, and never was called again by that particular company.

Ana Mardoll said...

I had no idea I was angry about this, BTW.

You certainly have every right to be! I remember some (female) gym teachers treating period cramps the same way and it was very problematic. I never had problems myself, but two of my girlfriends had debilitating cramps, and it was so frustrating that their (male) *doctors* took it more serious than their family and the school officials.

At least the doctors *did* take it seriously, but I remember there always being a "oh, what do the men know, women have been having periods for Xs of years. (Insert 'thousands' or 'millions' depending on the speaker.)*

* Seems to me we talked about this in the Twilight pregnancy thread, too. The "women have been X for years" phrase can cause so much damage when weilded incorrectly.

Ana Mardoll said...

When it comes to saying no to solicitors, I was told that if you ask for the solicitor's info and then request they remove your name from their list, you can possibly sue? I've tried it before, and never was called again by that particular company.

The ones in our area have been trained to prevent that, I think. Someone called the other day and I said, "No, and please take us off your list," but what REALLY happened was:

"No, and --" *CLICK*

They hung up on me to prevent 'hearing' the request. I didn't know whether to laugh or feel bad for them that they'd clearly been trained for that.

Thette said...

I'm really enjoying this deconstruction, and I decided to see the Twilight movie when it showed up on TV this week. With your treatment of the text in mind, the movie comes across as much less problematic, and the relationship between Bella and Charlie is portrayed realistically, as two family members trying and failing to reconnect.

Brin Bellway said...

Swanblood: I have to skip to the end of this post before I even finish reading it to say: as someone who identifies therian (literally, not human in a human's body), this made me smile so much.

Yeah, I thought of otherkin too.
(Hello, Tsu! Bit surprised to see you around here.)


Come to think of it, I vaguely remember reading a teacher's guide to blood-typing classes somewhere in the wilds of the Internet. Mostly what I remember is the warning to be prepared: a few times, they said, they had students who realised their blood type couldn't be inherited from the types of who they thought were their biological parents.

Rakka said...

Sorry about possible typos and bad syntax, am using a borrowed laptop, two of my fingers on right hand are neatly bandaged, and am on Tramal. So drowsy.

We did blood testing in a voluntary biology course in high school (that focused on sciences - there were some 10 or 11 courses of biology available, when normally there's five or so) and the rhesus testing in maybe 9th grade. I don't really see why it would be strange, as desinfecting the skin and only lancetting those who volunteered was the way we did it, IIRC. It's not like people are poking each other's bleeding fingers to give their classmates all possible bloodborne diseases... at least in my high school people were generally pretty mature.

What strikes me odd is that they allow underage people to donate blood at all. Is that common in the USA?

Brin Bellway said...

Rakka: Sorry about possible typos and bad syntax, am using a borrowed laptop, two of my fingers on right hand are neatly bandaged, and am on Tramal. So drowsy.

Get well soon.

What strikes me odd is that they allow underage people to donate blood at all. Is that common in the USA?

This came up on FC's blog a while back. Emilyperson said, and I quote, "At least in my state*, sixteen-year-olds have to get parental permission, and seventeen-year-olds can donate without it. I’m not sure about the rest of the country."

*[She lives in Michigan, as I recall.]

Rakka said...

Thanks, I'll try to, so that I can go wall climbing again. :) Maybe in the future I'll be smart enough to always use the wooden guider thingy with the planing table. But could've been worse, and I heal pretty fast.

It makes sense that underage ppl would be allowed to donate blood with caretaker's permission, sadly you have to wait until 18 over here. I donated blood the first chance I got to, that is after high school on my 18th birthday. It's been a long while after I last did, though - came up anemic the last time I went to donate, and I'd need to take iron before I go next time and I always forget.

depizan said...

I've had cramps so bad I've puked before. I think I've known more people who have bad cramps, at least part of the time, than people who just have mild cramps all of the time. That makes it seem extra strange that people, even other women, don't take menstrual cramps seriously.

Also, bad cramps can be a sign of endrometriosis, among other things. And, according to wikipedia, anyway 25% of women have dysmenorrhea (menstrual pain so bad it interferes with their life) and 67 to 90% of teenagers. HOLY FUCK why do we not care about this!?

jp said...

**It would have been funny if you'd said "I don't want to run into my ex" and when they said "you poor thing, I completely understand" you said "actually **** you, that's a lie. The heck is wrong with you that you would only care what I want if I bring a man into it, much less one I'm not even still with?! Quit being such a handmaiden of the patriarchy and ovary up!"**

Ha, that would have been funny indeed, although it would probably have made for an awkward Thanksgiving or two!

As for gender-reversing Ana's example, I think there's a huge cultural difference. "My husband won't let me" (ewww, even saying it...) still garners wide social acceptance (or at least that seems to be what we are debating here). "My WIFE won't let me"? I don't think a man would imply, much less openly state that, less he be derided as wimpy, whipped, etc.

More tales from inside the crypt that is phone solicitation, the kindest thing to do for the poor underpaid schmuck on the other end is to HANG UP ("Sorry, not interested. Thank you, goodbye. CLICK."). Don't make the mistake of waiting for a reply. We were trained to keep on talking no matter how hard the other person was trying politely to get off the line. My supervisor would stalk fiendishly up and down our rows, bellowing "DON'T YOU LET ME HEAR YOU SAY GOODBYE!!!"
Yes, we were to stay on the line and keep talking, until the person lost his/her temper, swore at us for our persistent rudeness, and slammed down the phone.

Now, the solicitor trick of hanging up the phone before the callee can request being taken off the list? That's a new one, but then my stint in that particular hell ended long before the no-call laws. But I'm not surprised.

Ana Mardoll said...

@Thette, AWESOME! That should be a site tagline: making Twilight less problematic! Or, really, both more AND less problematic, because for every bubble we press down, a new one seems to pop up. :D

Ana Mardoll said...

Mostly what I remember is the warning to be prepared: a few times, they said, they had students who realised their blood type couldn't be inherited from the types of who they thought were their biological parents.

..... o.O

Wow. All the more reason for Mr. Banner to send home permission slips. I hadn't even thought of that.

Ana Mardoll said...

And, according to wikipedia, anyway 25% of women have dysmenorrhea (menstrual pain so bad it interferes with their life) and 67 to 90% of teenagers. HOLY FUCK why do we not care about this!?

Seriously, I had no idea it was that bad. I would have guessed more like 10-20%.

Throw that one in the "womens' medical problems aren't taken seriously" bucket, I guess. *sigh*

Mime_Paradox said...

Over in Puerto Rico, my (private, Catholic) high school held occasional blood drives, sponsored and promoted by the Red Cross student club. On the day of the blood drive, the library would be retrofitted to serve as the collection center, and medical personnel would take care of anything involving actual blood. I don't recall if minors needed permission slips--I never volunteered--but the impression I got was that it wasn't necessary, at least for people in the higher grades. I have no idea if this reflects the situation in Puerto Rico or not.

bekabot said...

*oops.

This is one of the points at which I identify with Bella...I don't have any trouble with giving blood per se (never have) but I used to wig out slightly when they stuck me with the needle. The problem was easily solved: all I had to do was just not watch them stick me, and everything else went smoothly. I put this response down as phobic without a blush; maybe it is a little neurotic, but so what? I don't like having my boundaries breached and that's a fact, so actually it makes a reassuring amount of sense that I wouldn't like to see myself pricked with a pointy sharp thing. I think Bella might have some of the same issues. She's weird about her boundaries: most of the time she holds herself aloof from other people; she ignores them, doesn't talk to them or offers them perfunctory replies (and sometimes she insults them outright). But she undergoes bouts of extreme self-forgetfulness, like going off into woods she doesn't know, alone, without letting anyone know where she's headed or that she's going out walking at all, and like detouring into the warehouse district of Port Angeles, also unaccompanied, and also without giving anyone a heads-up. (Edward notices this discrepancy and is puzzled by it.) I wonder whether Bella's boundary-weirdness might not manifest itself as a repugnance on her part to seeing her "outside" breached, and, also, if this might not be another factor behind her attraction not just to Edward, but to all the vampires: they fascinate her because they have such flawless, unbreachable skins.

chris the cynic said...

Bella did not get sick because of the sight of blood, or because of the prospect of drawing her own blood. Some pages later Bella will explain exactly what makes her sick. She is sickened by the smell of blood.

Edward thinks people can't smell blood and says as much when Bella says she did, Bella responds, "Well, I can -- that's what makes me sick. It smells like rust ... and salt."

Given how little blood it takes to nauseate her, and the distance from which she can smell that small amount of blood, the profusely bloody Tyler should have been a problem.

Timothy (TRiG) said...

It's one of my regrets that I never donated blood in the window between leaving the Witnesses and having gay sex. I know my blood type has been tested, but I forget what it is. Must check one day.

TRiG.

chris the cynic said...

Edith, Ben, and bloodtyping:

-

"I'm not going to class today," she said, looking at the bottlecap.

"Why not?"

"Blood typing," Edith said. And suddenly I flashed back to outside the van. Edith taking charge as soon as she saw the crowd, making sure that people didn't move Tricia until EMTs who could safely move her arrived, and then, after she took one look at Tricia, having to spend the rest of the time several feet away looking in the opposite direction while she talked me through basic first aid.

I shook the uncomfortable images from my head, and focused on the only part of it that mattered: Edith does not do well with blood. "Yeah. I ... I forgot. It's too bad you know, you'd make a good doctor."

"I just picked up some stuff from my mother." I hadn't even thought of that. "You'd better go or you'll be late."

-

Ms. Banner mentioned that a blood drive would be happening soon, she called the mobile blood getting station a bloodmobile, which is an interesting name if ever there was one. She demonstrated what we'd be doing on herself, and soon it was time to do it. I was ready, until the smell hit me.

I've never been bothered by the smell of blood before. Hell, I don't eve know if I've ever noticed it before, but once I did I was having flashbacks to finding Tricia in the van. The most vivid memory I'd ever had. It was like what happened at lunch but a thousand times worse. All I could think of was seeing her there scraped up and covered in blood.

I couldn't get it out of my head. I put my head in my hands and ... and I didn't have a plan for what to do next. I just stayed there. I'm not sure how long I was there, but then there was a hand on my shoulder and I heard my name said. I looked up to see Ms. Banner.

"Are you all right?" she asked.

I considered all kinds of answers, as I often do. I considered trying to say that I was feeling sick for unrelated reasons, I considered explaining that this had never happened before and that's what I hadn't opted out of the class, I considered claiming I was fine but I was just tired, I considered any number of lies and half truths and various true things as well. Finally I said, "No." And then, for no apparent reason, I started to cry. I mentioned Tricia and the van. Ms. Banner said that it was ok. She asked me if I could walk, I could, she sent me to the nurse.

Before I left she called Angel over and told him to walk with me. I think she was afraid he might make fun of me, though by this time I'd dried my eyes and I thought I looked fine, because she warned him that if he wasn't nice that would make her angry, "And you wouldn't like me when I'm angry," I smiled, it was the first Incredible Hulk joke I'd ever heard her make. She said, "That's better," in response to my smile, and then sent us off.

Makabit said...

The Catholic high school I used to teach at has annual blood drives. Students are encouraged to participate, but they just sign up if they want to, and then get a slip sent when the blood drawers are ready for them. You have to be seventeen, I think, and over a certain weight, which left some of our more petite girls out.

I don't know if I would say it was exclusive in a bad way. Some of the kids couldn't donate, but it wasn't obvious if you didn't, and they told the kids in advance that there were a bunch of reasons people couldn't.

bekabot said...

"Bella did not get sick because of the sight of blood, or because of the prospect of drawing her own blood. Some pages later Bella will explain exactly what makes her sick. She is sickened by the smell of blood."

Respectfully, I'd like to disagree; I agree that Bella isn't made ill because her blood has been shed; she can't be because that hasn't happened yet. What she's distressed by is the prospect that it's going to happen soon. All that's going on when Bella gets faint is that Mr. Banner is making the rounds with the water drops for the cards; plus, some of Bella's classmates (not Bella) are already pricking their fingers, even though Mr. Banner has told them not to. If Bella can in fact smell blood it would be possible that Mike's blood and their blood is what's making her ill, except that

"...Given how little blood it takes to nauseate her, and the distance from which she can smell that small amount of blood, the profusely bloody Tyler should have been a problem."

Yes, and he wasn't. You might say that the accident with the van (in which Tyler was originally injured) took place outdoors and that the scent of blood would have been less concentrated in the Forks High parking lot than later on in the nurse's office after Mr. Banner's Biology class, except that after the van incident Bella and Tyler inexplicably end up in the same hospital room, side by side. Bella reports that Tyler is pretty messed up and her testimony is both convincing and not exactly heart-rent. ("I recognized Tyler Crowley...beneath the bloodstained bandages wrapped tightly around his head...nurses began unwinding his soiled bandages, exposing a myriad of shallow slices all over his forehead and left cheek.") Remember that Tyler is lying close to Bella and that he's bleeding over half his face, and that Bella is looking right at him without being particularly shocked or affected. She does ask him if he's OK, as is only courteous, but she says nothing about being able to smell his blood, let alone about being made sick by it. (On the contrary, Tyler is the one who's worried about her.) All this is happens in an enclosed space, as does Lee's bleeding in the nurse's office after Mr. Banner's class, except that Bella after the van accident has a much better opportunity to get a snootful of the scent of Tyler's blood than she later does of Lee's. I'm not saying that Bella can't smell blood (or blood mixed with skin oil) in large quantities or small; what I'm saying is that that's not what makes her sick. It can't be, because she's already been exposed to it in fairly plentiful quantities and it hasn't made her sick.

Bella is not always a reliable narrator. Right after Edward shoos her out the nurse's office door she remarks that Lee hasn't been made sick by watching other people, like her. But Bella wasn't made sick by watching other people bleed. She didn't see anybody bleed but Mike. She saw Mike get stuck, and after that she put her head down on her desk. She overheard some of her classmates pricking their fingers, and then Mr. Banner showed up at her side and asked if she was all right. Mr. Banner's concern was justified; Bella was not all right, but why? Why should she be nauseated by seeing Mike needle-stuck when she didn't object to seeing Tyler slashed? And why, if she's averse to blood, either the sight or the scent of it, would she later ask Edward if she could watch him hunt?

Just asking...very deferentially.

Makabit said...

That's another reason you maybe don't want to do this in class, as though all the other stuff weren't enough. Family secrets can come out in a class on genetics.

Makabit said...

Even if Mr. Banner had sent home permissions slips, a parent might not necessarily realize that blood typing would eliminate certain possiblities for parentage.

I suppose I'm a bit wary about this. A young relative found out this last year that her dad was not her biological father. As a teenager. Bleah. I'm not sure how it happened, but I don't think that having it dawn on you in biology class is a good idea. It's a long shot, but the consequences are potentially ugly.

Brin Bellway said...

I know when I read it, my first thought was to work out if my own family made genetic sense. (We do, assuming Dad and Brother are heterozygotes.) I'm not sure why they would bother to keep it secret, but apparently some people do.

Makabit said...

Lots of reasons, obviously. In my own family's case, I was mad as hell when I heard what was going on, not only because the kid was freaked out (and if they'd just told her from the beginning, it wouldn't have been traumatic) but because I didn't even know this was a secret. We'd seen them recently at a family reunion, so I kind of panicked in retrospect, realizing that I could have been the one to break the news, simply because no one told me it was a secret.

She was a toddler when her mom married the man who raised her, and I just assumed she remembered, or had been told, that there was a time before he was in the family. I thought they were still in touch with the grandparents from that side.

Anyway. I don't know why it was a secret, but I can tell you, as a former high school teacher, I'm glad it didn't become an unsecret in the middle of my lab.

Ana Mardoll said...

I agree, and it seems -- based on what I remember from this NEVER COMING UP AGAIN in the first book -- that the only point here is for Edward to be amused that Bella is distressed by the sight of other people's blood. He has a line about "not even your OWN blood", and it's all double-entendrey because he's a vampire and he sees blood all the time and she'll be a very bad vampire if she's that freaked out by blood.

Also, AWESOME Edith rewrite. I like how you retroactively fixed the van scene, too. :)

chris the cynic said...

So, on the one hand, Bella doesn't react well to blood and Edwards got his, "I'm an awesome vampire," superiority thing going, on the other hand he seems completely thrown when he finds out Bella can smell blood. As if she's the first non-vampire he's ever met who can do it*. Which seems to be points in favor of Bella already being on her way to being a vampire.

I feel like this section is supposed to be saying something about Bella and her fitness to be a vampire, but I'm not sure what that would be. On the one hand, she has super** blood senses. That seems like a mark in favor of vampireness. On the other hand her super blood senses make her sick. That seems like a mark against vampireness.

-

* Which, again, really? Invading minds for several decades now, never before met someone who could smell blood.

** Within the context of Twilight as determined by Edward's belief humans can't smell blood.

kitryan said...

Not that it 'explains' anything, since there are smell references and the blood would smell the same however it was let, but personally, I'd be more bothered by the bio lab than the van accident. My blood squick is mostly medical/human inflicted. Scenes of medical procedures in movies, descriptions of surgeries, blood draws, descriptions of torture (fortunately I've not witnessed any) all make me faint much more than accidental bloodletting. I still might get faint or pass out from an accidental injury, but I can watch action movies just fine where the scene in the Craft where there's a medical procedure seen up close- I had to make my little sister get me some water and close my eyes.
Has anyone mentioned the fanfic 'Luminosity'? It's a version of Twilight where Bella's smart- a la Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality. While it gets really removed from its source material by the end and rather implausible, there's a lot of the same stuff going on here-basically, how can this be less full of fail?
It also gives Bella a real motivation. She's offended by death. I would say it's at least as well written as the source material :) and at least has the goal of being internally consistent with motivation and character.

Steve Morrison said...

Just a few hours ago I was part of a discussion about a teenage girl who doesn’t know she is adopted! One person opined that her parents should tell her, because it would be a very bad experience for her to find out by accident.

Makabit said...

Well, possibly if she has vampiric abilities or characteristics even before becoming an actual vampire, the 'sickness' is produced by the disconnect. Other people can't smell blood, and anything she might do in response to this awarness--feed? is going to seem disgusting to a human-socialized being.

Douglas Adams once wrote about a theory--he wasn't sure how serious it was--that vertigo is caused by the conflict between the pterodactyl in the core of the brain looking out over an open space and saying "Jump!" and everything else yelling "NO, NO, don't jump, for God's sake, don't jump!" And we think about jumping. Some people with acrophobia are quite tormented by it. Remember our discussion about thoughts we're not supposed to have...you're not supposed to respond to people's nearness by wanting to sink fangs into them. You suppress the thoughts, and you avoid blood, because that arouses the thought pattern.

Question: can Edward read other vampire's minds?

Silver Adept said...

Ah, the awesome from this thread alone is pure enough that it could power more than a few Massive Dynamos.

My blood donor cards, both of them, have my blood type rather prominently displayed. (Fairly common.) Unfortunately, while I'd like to donate as regularly as possible (the only squick I have is on watching the needle, thankfully), the problem is that the hours the donation center and its mobile fleet keep are such that I would have to sprint out of work and go directly there to catch them before they back up for the night. Or I'm feeling sick. In my collegiate days, I could manage it fairly regularly because blood drives were fairly common on campus and all you had to know was where the drive was to get to it.

(And before that, the high school drive said that you had to be...16 or 17 to participate. And above 110 lbs, which made some of the more petite people get turned away...and some other ones turned on the aggressive determination and got in anyway.)

Regarding the typing class and Mr. Banner...wow. So many things wrong with that class. Also, Mr. Banner's rather blase reaction to Bella being queasy is inexcusable. Unless he likes having a chain reaction of queasiness and puking from his students, that is. (And all the bits about paternity, genetics, and bloodborne pathogens, too - they're just as important, if not more so.)

TRiG, we hope for the day when a man having sex with another man is no longer considered cause for permanent deferral.

Makabit said...

I'm not an expert, but my experience has been that people who know from early childhood that they were adopted aren't troubled by it, but finding out later in life is harder. It's simply not going to be easy once they're a teen, no matter how you dice it, but I'd still want to tell a child myself, rather than let them find out in some unexpected way.

Makabit said...

"TRiG, we hope for the day when a man having sex with another man is no longer considered cause for permanent deferral."

Jeez Louise, this! One of my friends can't donate now because her husband dated men for a while--in the early 1980s--and he's forever on the ban list, and now so is she, unless they don't have sex for six months--which is rather a lot to ask just so someone can give a couple pints of blood.

mmy said...

It is passages like this (blood typing / not taking responsibility for a student in distress) more than descriptions of !sparkly vampires! that for me place this book into an alternate reality.

I taught undergraduates for years in the US. They arrive 17-18 years old (not much older than the high school students in Twilight) and like many a professor at a residential college I had to deal with students who might never have made it to class if they were attending a large nonresidential university. I had to deal with a student who collapsed (and lost consciousness) on the floor, I had to deal with a student who had a seizure during class, I had to deal with a semi-conscious student who could not raise her head from her desk/was drooling/couldn't form words, I had to deal with a student who I thought was about to self harm in my presence and a student who emailed me what read as a suicide note.

And I taught at an expensive private college.

Talking to my colleagues the only systemic difference I found among them (as to how they responded) was that male colleagues tended to panic more quickly than female colleagues. The student who collapsed on the floor of a classroom was not mine--I became involved when the male colleague screamed at the top of his voice "what's the campus emergency number" over and over again.

The rules are fairly straightforward. If you are in a room with an intercom (most elementary and high schools are wired that way in Canada at least) you stay by the student in distress and have another student hold down the intercom button for you.[1] You request immediate adult backup to the room. You do not leave the student in distress. Not for a second. The adult at the other end of the intercom calls the nurse/health office AND sends another adult to the room. The backup adult takes control of the non-collapsed/ill students in the room and removes them (usually to the gym or cafeteria--someplace where they can sit and be easily supervised) while you remain with the student in distress. You stay until health personnel arrive. They assess the student. If the student is under the age of 18 they have to be observed until their guardian/parent is reached. If they are over 18 you do not leave them until they agree to be treated by responsible medical personnel or sign a waiver that they are are leaving against medical advice.

From the description in the text what Mr. Banner should have done is call the office and have them send down a responsible adult. Then either Mr. Banner should have taken Bella to the nurse while the responsible adult supervised the class OR the responsible adult would have taken Bella to the nurse while the class continued.

Either way, no teacher at the local high school would have reacted so casually to the distress of the daughter of the Chief of Police.


[1] If you are in a room without an intercom you instruct two students to go TOGETHER to the nearest office of a professor and report to that person what has happened in the classroom.

Will Wildman said...

Regarding blood labs: we definitely never did that at my school, and the lack of alcohol swabbing in the scene is causing my brain to scream. I found out my type when I donated in 2nd year university (B-, which they insisted was very rare, but I'm pretty sure it's only rare in the sense of 'there are so many types that most of them represent a small % of the population').

Regarding using the patriarchy to defend yourself from the patriarchy: Ana linked to Kit's excellent Perfect Mother thread over at the Slacktiverse, and as I recall that discussion brought up the variety of related Perfect {Female Role} archetypes that get instilled in people - I don't remember if 'Perfect Feminist' was one of them, but it should be. Making a person feel that they have to do everything 'right' every time all the time and eternally act in opposition to every injustice without ever taking an easier road is another way of exhausting feminists, making it harder to ever fight inequalities, and making it seem like progress is impossible because it's all just too big.

Judo is a neat martial art because it favours shorter people and personal strength is not so important - what you do need is an understanding of anatomy and physics, and then you use your opponent's size, strength, and momentum against them. Seems to me that using an ad hoc "Can't do that because [male-related thing]" to end an ongoing problem also frees up more of one's personal resources to go and do other awesome pro-feminist things like deconstruct Twilight and advocate for not putting up with harassment.

Regarding indefatigable telemarketers: I had one a couple of weeks ago who first refused to take 'no' about five times, at which point I hung up. A minute later, brrrring: "Sir, why did you hang up on me?" *click* Brrring: "Sir, if you would just let me expla-" *click* Brrrrrrrrrrring....

I get that you don't ever say 'goodbye', but surely they have enough numbers to call that they could get a much better rate of sales by moving on to the next person than by hassling the person who just hung up on them twice? Are they hoping I'm embarrassed? I'm not. They're doing their job and I'm giving my response and, in my view, the system was working as intended.

Inquisitive Raven said...

Speaking as a a diabetic, that rectangular box is a stabby thing, or rather it's a spring loaded holder for a stabby thing. The spring loaded part means that the depth to which you're stabbed is controlled which wouldn't be the case without the holder.

Now the rectangular boxes seem to be single use disposable widgets. The lancets I use daily look like this, and fit into a holder called a "lancing device," which is spring loaded like the box. The individual lancets are single use, but the holder is reusable. Also, for blood glucose testing, it's actually recommended that one wash the area to be stabbed with soap and water before testing. Alcohol can apparently throw off the reading. I use alcohol preps to clean up afterwards.

mmy said...

Regarding indefatigable telemarketers: I had one a couple of weeks ago who first refused to take 'no' about five times, at which point I hung up. A minute later, brrrring: "Sir, why did you hang up on me?" *click* Brrring: "Sir, if you would just let me expla-" *click* Brrrrrrrrrrring....

Not too long ago I got a call at home from some company that included "ontario" and "government" in their name. No, they weren't from the Ontario government--but they claim to be doing "energy checks" on houses. I said "no thanks" about five times and when the caller wouldn't stop talking I hung up. They called me back (immediately) saying "did you cut us off?" I told them "yes, and I don't want to hear from you again." And hung up.

They called me back AGAIN. The man at the other end said "we are in the neighbourhood and it doesn't matter if you hang up we will be at your house in minutes." To which I said something like "fine, then I'll call the police and charge you making threatening class." No, no one arrived but....

My guess is that they WERE in the neighbourhood, (their talk started by claiming that they were in the neighbourhood, just down the street at Mrs. X's house and they might as well drop by and check mine out while they were there.) They had been calling house after house trying to get someone to let them in and finally were losing patience. I am sure that they do sometimes come to people's doors and physically intimidate them. I wasn't impressed that they knew the name of one of my neighbours (since they are in the phone book) and I imagine they got the hell out of dodge when I told them that if I saw a sign of them I would call the police.

The scam is that they come to people's houses and either case them and/or get the person to sign a contract for "energy saving products" that is overpriced, provides no services and locks them in for life.

It did really hit me thought that they were trying to find women alone during the day (the call was at 10:30 in the morning) and in my neighbourhood most of the younger women work. Older women (I imagine them thinking) would hand the phone over to their husbands and so any woman who answered the phone three times and didn't hand it over to "the man of the house" was probably a widow living alone and ........

It was actually quite scary and I did some research on the company and usually they just pressure people into usurious contracts but some other people had encountered the type of treatment I got.

Inquisitive Raven said...

I did do the blood typing lab in high school biology, but 1) it was in the 70's, so pre-AIDS, and 2) we got the syllabus for the term on the first day of term, so there was plenty of warning. It was during the genetics unit, which actually makes sense, rather than randomly sprung on us because, hey, blood drive. Speaking of units, is there any kind of rhyme or reason to what's being covered on any given day in biology class? Or is this a case of Meyer picking things because they happen to fit her story needs?

Ana Mardoll said...

Will, I'm saving that Perfect Feminist concept for the time I feel like a fem-fail. Thank you!

mmy, that sounds chilling. :(

Gelliebean said...

@ bekabot - Many, many <3s for the great image of Bella as vampire-in-training... :-D I don't know if that is exactly what you intended, but that's what sprang up in my mind, and it makes her more palatable as a character to me, at least, if I can pretend that's more important than Twu Wuv.

@ Makabit - "vertigo is caused by the conflict between the pterodactyl in the core of the brain looking out over an open space and saying "Jump!" and everything else yelling "NO, NO, don't jump, for God's sake, don't jump!" And we think about jumping."

This happened to me at the Grand Canyon and it really frightened me.... :-( It's kinda good to know I'm not the only one.

@ Ana - don't feel bad about resorting to whatever means you must to get off the phone. In a perfect world, each of us would be able to make absolute decisions in our own right, without having to play the 'authority male' trump card; but until that happens, do whatever works to get on with your life and not waste it on the phone with people you don't want to be talking to.

I think part of the problem is that many women are socialized to avoid giving offense, to put others' needs/wants ahead of our own, to be under-assertive. Many times I've gotten a soliciting call and been more worried about hurting the salesperson's feelings than in protecting myself - protecting my own time, which they really have no rightful claim on; protecting my cellphone minutes, which I bought for my own convenience and not theirs; protecting my own wellbeing, which can be damaged by the pressure in trying to balance my obligation to be polite and my frustration that my politeness isn't reciprocated by the salesperson saying "Thank you, goodbye" when I say I'm not interested. I hope that last doesn't sound too overly dramatic - it really does cause stress and tension. :-( The only way I've been able to combat those tendencies to be accomodating is to adopt an Eff You attitude and keep repeating to myself that I'll never meet these people, shouldn't care whether they think I'm rude, and really, who the hell do they think they are to just call up out of the blue and impose this kind of obligation on me just because they could? It's harder than it sounds to maintain that kind of attitude indefinitely, but it also makes me feel pro-active about hanging up on a call I don't want.

When I was younger, my parents always told me that if I came under pressure to do anything I didn't want to, I could blame them completely. "Oh, no, my Dad would ground me for life if I did X!" If "blaming" your husband saves your wellbeing and lets you concentrate your energy somewhere you want to, instead of spending it on people who have imposed that on you out of the blue, I say use it.

graylor said...

Reading about how other people respond to telephone solicitors makes me realize my socialization as a girl pretty much failed. Um, yay for relatives who force you to either cower or develop boundaries of steel?

I'm polite and calm with telemarketers because, hey, it's a sucky job and it's not their fault they have to be asses to do it properly. I've found that saying 'no' twice then dropping my voice a bit and saying 'No, I'm hanging up now' absolves me from nice-girl discomfort. If they choose not to listen to my warning and get an earful of being hung up on, it's their problem. I've never had one try to call back, though. *boggles* Wolfram & Hart is writing telemarketer protocols, the better to feed off the humiliation and frustration of everyone involved?

Dav said...

I got some very scary coercive threats by phone earlier this fall; basically, they'd call about a debt - in my case, possibly one that had been dealt with upwards of a year ago.* They began by telling me they needed to serve papers "unless we take care of this right away". I told them to send me the info. They called back with threats to send over the sheriff within the hour. Very intimidating stuff.

Then it got epically worse. They called my parent. At home, in a different state. They called my workplace and talked to my supervisor. I couldn't get a handle on what the name of the group was, or what they did.

Then the next time they called, they claimed, thankfully, to belong to a county that doesn't exist in my state, which cut through the fear long enough for me to do some googling.

Turns out it's all a load of hogwash, but it nearly got me; that rush of adrenalin is not good for rational thinking. I called the police, who were not remotely interested in following up, despite what appeared to me to be clear criminal intent. (People who serve papers are legally obligated to serve the papers; proof of debt is required from anyone trying to collect, if someone asks a debt collector not to call, they're obligated to stop calling, that line about the sheriff is 70 kinds of B.S., and they were trying to appear to be affiliated with the government.)

Thankfully, I work in a place that calmly accepted that I was not actually a debt-ridden liability - plenty of places wouldn't give you a second chance.

Thankfully, they stopped calling after I pointed out that [X] County is not an actual place**, but it was very scary and I bet they get quite a bit of money.

* US Bank is evil. Do not bank with them unless you have no choice, and document *everything* or they will lose records and extort money from you.

** I wish I hadn't now, because it would have been nice if they'd continued to tip off other people with that mistake. Adrenalin - the biochemical definition of a mixed blessing.

---
Anecdata:

I didn't do blood typing in *any* of my biology labs, and there were a couple where it might have been appropriate. But my high school was dirt poor, especially for science - dissecting earthworms was the big ticket item of the year, and we had to work in threes. That probably was kind of dangerous because the scalpels were kind of dull and rusty. We didn't do agglutination of any kind in lab, although we learned about it in class.

The riskiest thing we did in an undergrad bio lab was swab each other's throats for culture, and then compare the culture to other plates we grew of Salmonella, E. coli, etc. The swabs were sterile, which would have been great, except someone in my lab got the order confused, and instead of swabbing her lab partner's throat, then the plate, then using a clean swab to dip into the Salmonella and wipe on another plate, she dipped in the Salmonella and then wiped down her lab partner's throat. Oops.

---

I kind of like giving blood, but they're a trek by public transportation. I feel terrible about it, actually, because I'm 90% sure I'm O neg. If they took at the hospital, I would give regularly. (I think - who knows, right?)

I really should make time for it. Somehow.

Timothy (TRiG) said...

Well, in Good Omens, telemarketers are a tool of Satan. They bother me rarely. The latest one I had was the "We've detected that your computer has been infected with a virus" scam. My mother got that one once and was a bit panicked by it.

TRiG.

depizan said...

US Bank is evil. Do not bank with them unless you have no choice, and document *everything* or they will lose records and extort money from you.

I don't know about losing records, but I know they lose money. How do I know this? Well...

I used to work for a small bookstore chain in Iowa and Nebraska (said bookstore chain is now defunct due to the children of the founder not inheriting his business sense). The chain banked with US Bank. At night, we'd deposit - in two separate bags - the deposit and the "base," which the bank would hold onto, but not open. (theoretically) In the morning, we'd retrieve the deposit bag, which would be empty, except for a deposit slip, unless we'd done a change order, and the base, which would have exactly what was left in it the night before.

Except for the mornings when that wasn't the case. In my couple of years with the bookstore, this nice morning ritual did not go as planned. Once, at the Iowa store I started out at, I opened the base to find an entire extra bundle of twenties in it. After staring at it for a bit, I took it back to the bank and explained where I found it. They were terribly puzzled. Once, at the Nebraska store I later worked at, I found even more neatly bank-bundled money in the deposit bag. I didn't count it, I just went straight back to the bank and went (hopefully more politely) WTF!? They had no idea.

I would never ever bank at a bank that randomly puts large amounts of money in other people's bank bags. Especially when, on one occasion, it was in a bank bag they weren't even supposed to open.

But, if I were a less honest person, I would be a much richer person.

Dav said...

That is amazing. Do you think there was something shady going down, like your bag and the mob's bag got switched?

depizan said...

They were our bank bags, or our keys wouldn't have opened them. The added contents, however, could well have belonged to the mob, or god knows who else. Something very weird was going on.

Inquisitive Raven said...

Interesting. What's the purpose of the base? When I owned a small business, we just dropped the deposit, using a disposable plastic bag. Well, until we started using a bank in walking distance of the store. After that, someone would run the deposits in during the bank's business hours.

depizan said...

The base was the money you always had - you must have called it something in your business, unless yours was such that you wouldn't need to make change. We started the day with *tries to remember* I think it was $100 - couple rolls of each kind of change, some ones, and some fives. But the stores didn't have safes, so we'd deposit the base every night (except Saturday night, since the banks weren't open on Sunday) so that there wasn't money siting in the store over night tempting people to rob it. (Or, more likely, to make the insurance company happy. I don't think thieves come with the ability Detect Money.)

Silver Adept said...

@Will - There are only eight blood types, and the RH negative types are all rarer than their RH positive counterparts. B- is quite rare in terms of percentage of the population (most of us are A or O types and usually RH positive). Were you an AB type, you would have probably gotten a plea to give as soon as you were eligible, and if you were the truly rare AB positive, there may have been financial incentives involved.

Hearing the stories of telemarketing reminds me of the bitter complaints a frieend of mine has whenever she has to work retention for the call center she's at, because she figures, rightly, that anyone calling to cancel is not happy and unlikely to be persuaded by the tools in her toolkit. She still does well, but I think it's her personality, rather than anything the company does.

Rikalous said...

So Bella's drawn to a vampire, and he to her. Bella is uniquely and inexplicably immune to the vampire's powers. Bella has a weird relationship to blood, which includes being able to smell it more easily than vampire expects. All of this points to a dhampyr.* I understand that Renesmee turns out to be a normal-ish vampire, so "vampire dad, human mom" isn't how you create a dhampyr. I seem to recall that the text states that human dad and vampire mom can't reproduce, but whether that's true or Volturi propaganda designed to prevent anyone from trying for something as dangerous as a dhampyr. The third possibility is the Blade method: turn a pregnant woman, and the fetus grows up to be a dhampyr. Either of the second two methods would require that Bella is adopted, but I could see Charlie and Renee adopting a kid in order to try and salvage their relationship.

*A half-vampire, and usually the natural enemy of full-blooded vampires. Frequently have the advantages of both sides of the family and none of the disadvantages, so they can use vampiric powers and go out in the daytime.
----
My experiences with giving blood have been pleasant, since I have good veins. The problem comes up when they test it, since there's some irregularity that makes my blood look suspiciously AIDS-y to the preliminary test, which naturally means I need to jump through hoops in order to get them to accept it.

I apologize if this double posts. My internet's being wonky.

bekabot said...

If Bella is a dhampyr (or has inherited vampy characteristics due to unrecorded dhampyr ancestry) that might account both for Alice's and Carlisle's initial enthusiasm about her and for Jasper's/Rosalie's/Emmett's notable lack of same. (It might also help explain the over-optomistic philosophy Esme shares with Bella: "You're what he [Edward] wants. It will work itself out.") The sneaky thing to do with a dhampyr who doesn't know she's a dhampyr could be to turn her and recruit her to your side; the more obvious solution would be to make away with her and then carry on as usual. Maybe there's an aspect to the fight Edward (supported by Carlisle and Alice) has with Jasper, Rosalie, and Emmett (Esme remaining neutral) about The Fate Of Bella of which we're unaware. Maybe it's an argument over tactics. Here the Cullens have found this human or human-ish girl who reminds them of themselves more than they like; she has at least some inkling of what they are; how do they prevent her from turning into a vampire-hunter later on in life? (She's already the police chief's daughter: massive inconvenience impends.) Edward wants to bite her. Two plans are under consideration. The plan favored by Edward, Carlisle and Alice is the plan under which Edward first seduces Bella and eventually inducts her into his clan. The second is the plan under which Edward stops fighting his instincts, bites and drains Bella, then buys some nice flowers for her wake. Plan Two has the virtue of simplicity, but Plan One promises the bigger payoff in the event that Bella turns out to be a real acquisition — and that could happen; Edward has tried to access her mind — several times, probably — and has failed. What to do? There are seven Cullens, an odd number which shouldn't end in a tie, but Esme is neutral. Edward pleads for more time: since he can't eavesdrop on Bella's thoughts through telepathy he's going to fish for them the hard way: couldn't that be made to fit into the "seduction" plan? Luckily for Edward, immortality has few more effects more striking than that it produces patience in those who possess it. The other vampires decide to give Edward the parole he asks for and the plot of Twilight is the result.

hapax said...

Our library keeps about three hundred dollars in "base money", but we have a safe. Of course, everybody and his pet dog knows the safe combination, and it hasn't been changed in thirty years, but still...

Anyways, one night the evening supervisor forgot to lock the safe, and in the morning the money was gone. We have various crews -- cleaning, repair, construction -- who work at night, so it could have been one of them, one of the staff, who knows?

We called the police -- mind you, these were the City police, and we are a City library, so we are essentially co-workers -- to report the robbery.

The officer came over and started writing down details... until we told him how much had been stolen. He laughed, and told us he would turn in a report, but for "so little money", it wasn't even worth it to assign someone to investigate.

More than one staff member confessed later that hearing this conversation made thoughts of embezzlement dance through our heads.

(Not mine, though. Whatever the Police Department may think, I've had the City Business Office return deposits that were as little as three cents short...)

depizan said...

Thoughts of something would dance through my head at that moment, all right, but I don't think it would be embezzlement.

hapax said...

Hee.

I believe that the precise comments were along the lines of, "Wow, we could throw a pretty posh staff luncheon for three hundred bucks!"

depizan said...

That you could!

J. Random Scribbler said...

I second the recommendation for Luminosity (http://luminous.elcenia.com/). It must've been mentioned here before -- vague memory tells me that this is where I first heard of it, even -- but it's worth a re-link. I ran into it shortly after giving up on reading New Moon, and it cleaned the bad taste right out of my mouth. It does get pretty ridiculous later on, but the first part is full of win, IMHO.

Laiima said...

We typed our own blood in sophomore biology (30 yrs ago). I'm B+.

I've donated blood a few times, but it was always very unpleasant. And I got the same annoying calls as Ana, and stuff in the mail, and iirc, emails, asking me to come back.

I just had a really unpleasant experience 2 weeks ago, getting blood drawn (preparation for an even-more-unpleasant medical procedure that I don't even want to have, dammit). I have tiny veins, and a very low pain threshold. When I get the really-good phlebotomists, they have no trouble. But everyone else? It's a nightmare. So, the guy I had 2 weeks ago was the latter. He started with my left arm, but no blood came out. Then my right arm (even though I'm right-handed). Then my left *hand*, which he wiggled the needle around. The pain, she was bad. Still nothing. I was about to cry, when he went and got the the really-good person, who got the whole draw -- from my left arm -- in about 30 seconds. Which was great, because I was about to completely lose it. As I left, I started shaking so bad I could barely get my coat back on. THen I had to sit in my car, shaking and crying, for about 10 minutes, before I could eat my snacks. And only then drive home. This is why I don't donate blood.

i just finished reading a book about cases where one twin was accidentally switched with a non-twin, either in the hospital or through adoption. No matter when people found out that their kid really wasn't their biological kid, or the kid found out their siblings and/or twin weren't related to them, everyone's lives were horribly damaged. In several cases, the mothers noticed the baby they took home from the hospital either didn't look like its "twin", didn't look like anyone else in their family, or wasn't the child they remembered interacting with earlier, but in all of those cases, the doctors and nurses totally pooh-poohed them, saying that "babies change all the time". (Not directly related to the blood thing, but interesting in a scary way.)

Inquisitive Raven said...

Okay, we had that, but it never occurred to us to store it at the bank overnight, nor did anyone ever suggest such a thing to us.

Makabit said...

Of course, if Bella is secretly adopted, that may explain her sudden 'squeamishness' about blood. If she knows on some level, she may not want to be able to confirm it.

Darth Ember said...

Edward will later confirm that every guy in the school was lusting after her fervently on her first day.

That, according to SMeyer, includes Mr. Banner. She has stated he had a thing for Bella. You know, because the actual text wasn't contemptible enough without the author contributing even more problematic stuff. /sarcasm

Ana Mardoll said...

Bwuh? I'm not sure I understand why an author would feel the need to confirm that.

Darth Ember said...

Because Meyer wants Bella to be Just That Hot.

C.Z. Edwards said...

I know I'm really late to the party, but...

Blood typing was a standard part of the Arizona high school science curriculum until about 1994, and it didn't require parental permission. I got to do it three times - in freshman Bio I, in sophomore Chemistry and in junior Bio II. Arizona is a bit odd in that the state mandates (or did, it has been nearly 20 years) certain aspects of the curriculum, but leaves it to the district to sort out where in that curriculum it falls. Had we not moved between my freshman and sophomore year, I probably would have only suffered one lancing, since the chem class at my first high school was more organic chem, and human biology was the freshman version in my first school and the junior version in my second.

State policy changed between 1992 when I finished Chem and 1995 when my sister started her high school sciences (at the same school) because that lab was dropped, probably for health and safety reasons. Ms.Meyers and I attended similar schools at about the same time (she's a couple years my senior, and our high school football teams usually ended up facing off somewhere in the state championships) so I certainly recognize the high school experiences, even if they're no longer accurate.

As a lab it wasn't what I'd call unsafe - compared to playing with sodium metal or hydrochloric acid, it was pretty tame. By the early 1990s, my cohort had been well trained on blood-borne pathogens, at least for teenagers. We knew not to go mixing it up and part of the lab instructions were to keep the pipettes away from each other. I also recall the kits coming with a sharps container and alcohol swabs. I remember that lab well because of the alcohol swabs.*

As far as parental permission, well... Arizona at the time gave a lot of latitude to schools on the notion of in loco parentis. At all three of my high schools, I needed only one parental permission slip each year for school travel, and I did a lot of traveling - a minimum of six speech events, ten football games with the band, five or six or ten marching band competitions, at least four Academic Decathalon trips, Mock Trial, science club. (oh, yes, indeed, I was a geek.) One slip, each year, signed at the beginning of the year and kept on file. (Had I needed a slip for each trip, I never would have been so academically active. Getting that one slip signed was often... Difficult, given my parents.) Of course, parents had the right to forbid anything, but there was a presumption of permission then and there that is no longer a given.

Twenty years makes a big difference in educational policy...

* Specifically the chem version of it. Yes, yes, advanced Chem, all of the smartest kids in my grade... And my lab partner realized that we had Bunsen burners on the table, and that alcohol burns!

storiteller said...

He was dangerous. He'd been trying to tell me that all along. He just looked at me, eyes full of some emotion I couldn't comprehend. "But not bad," I whispered, shaking my head. "No, I don't believe that you're bad."

Not to be all Whovian, but this is a theme that I think Doctor Who plays with in an interesting way. Because he is dangerous - in a way very different from Edward, obviously - but people, both male and female, want to hang out with him. Sometimes they're sort of dysfunctional about it, but sometimes they handle it really well.

In terms of giving blood, it's pretty much impossible for me to. Because my veins move around/collapse so much, they can usually get barely enough out of me for tests, but not enough for the Red Cross/hospital. One time I went and they poked me four different places (two on each arm) before the nurses gave up and sent me home.

Ana Mardoll said...

I'm fascinated to hear first hand about the blood-typing not requiring parental permission. I suppose I shouldn't be surprised, but it's funny how much of a difference 20 years seems to make. I guess it makes sense, though -- when I was in school, I suppose they had a similar "in loco parentis" policy. (Nice use of the phrase there!)

I'm working on a book right now where one of the main characters is attending a conservative Catholic school. When her liberal parents note that 'paddling' is still on the school official policy, they pitch a fit and insist that it be noted in their file that their daughter is NOT to be paddled under any circumstances. :) (I like these characters a lot, if that's not obvious.)

Silver Adept said...

@Darth Ember:

Wait, so Meyer wants Bella to be so hot that she inspires Hellooooo, Nurse! from everyone, including the teachers? Even with the Cullens there as the standard of beauty? Something's not kosher here, and the interpretations I can think of are uncharitable to either the residents of Fictional Forks or to the author, and they both involve "small town" mentalities.

Rivikah said...

I recall a biology class in which we were supposed to prick our fingers in order to do blood typing/look at blood under microscopes.

I did not personally complete the exercise as this was the biology class in which I discovered that in certain contexts, blood will make me quite light-headed

Kat said...

My sister took a course to become a phlebotomist. There were several things she had to do. She needed a TB test, a physical, and several vaccinations before starting the course.
Also, When you donate blood, they use the blood you donated to figure out your blood type. Why would they need to do blood typing in advance? Furthermore, when my school did blood drives, you had to be at least seventeen, but you didn't need parental permission.

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