in high school, red cross held blood drives in the gym at least once a semester. if i remember correctly, donating blood could clear up to 10 detentions! but unlike me, if you actually showed up early to school and went to those retarded advisement classes (aka homeroom in other places) and didn't have detentions to clear from your useless perfect attendance, you could also get tons of extra credit for most classes. even better, if you donated blood, they always gave you juice boxes and cookies, a tshirt and a sticker that read, "i donated blood today!" that falsely showed the entire world how much you cared about saving lives. this is what made me really annoyed:
- minimum age requirement was 17. i turned 17 senior year and this only gave me 1 year to even possibly take advantage of this marvelous opportunity. lame.
- minimum weight was something like 95-100 lbs. in high school, i always hovered around the high-80s (dairy-free, pescatarian diets really did something). i was planning on gaining weight in college anyway, so i thought i could finally get my juice box and humanitarian sticker then. i was over the detentions and extra credit, and their shirts were always too big for me anyway.
- sounds crazy, but i think drawing blood into a tube is totally fun. although getting shots are a different story.
then, in college, red cross raised the minumum weight to 110 lbs.! i'm a steady low 90 and the only time i would ever hit 110 is when im pregnant. and apparently, red cross doesn't think its a good idea to donate blood when there's another person growing inside of you. so, it looks like i'm never going to be able to swagger around with one of those stickers. bummer.