Emo Eric

Lately Chace has been sending nearly double the amount of “Whoa Ah Nee” text messages to my cell phone, which is his way of saying “I Love You” in Chinese. I called him up last week and he said that he had been worried about me after reading sushipanda.com, and displayed his usual restrained demeanor:

“Man, your stupid blog is depressing the shit outta me, I don’t wanna read it no more!”

With that, I did go back and noticed that a couple of my recent posts did make a slight detour into the melancholy…especially the one titled “Melancholy.” I think the past two weeks saw the presence of “Emo Eric,” which might have startled a few of you who got used to “Stupid Eric,” the author of the majority of this blog’s entries who writes fodder like this: “Yun and Yang don’t look as good together as Yin and Yang.” No worries though, “Stupid Eric” has returned with a vengeance. In fact, I’ve pinpointed the two main reasons why I’ve written about being lonely and thinking about what might have been: 1) I usually write blogs late at night when I’m lonely and think about what might have been, and 2) I gave blood about three weeks ago.

I’ve given blood on many occasions in the States, and once before in China. Never before was I offered 1000 RMB for my efforts. You see, according to the nerds at the Harvard International Review: The traditional view fostered by Chinese culture holds that blood is a precious and vital body component; losing blood, even through donation, is thus viewed as a threat to health. Also, according to some of my co-workers, donating blood is like giving a big fat middle finger to the Confucian ethic; your blood is supposedly a gift from your parents to you, and for you to give it away would be a sign of major disrespect. That’s why the government and nice companies like Intel induce their employees to donate with cold hard cash deposited into their checking accounts. That beats juice and cookies any time of the day.

Hence, the loophole: you’re not giving your blood away, you’re selling it! Now that’s something the Big C can smile on!

Even though I consider myself an intermediate-level blood donor, I couldn’t resist feeling some jitters while they poked and prodded and inserted away. It was all worth it though, because of the 1000 RMB knowledge that some hurting individual would get the benefit of my blood. The medical staff was comprised entirely of people who looked like taxi drivers in white smocks, which is slightly disturbing considering the large number of filthy taxi drivers that I’ve come across in my days here. What didn’t help was when I sat down and was pricked to determine my blood type, the driver, I mean doctor, exclaimed: “Wow, you sure have some thick blood!” When I inquired as to the significance of this, he just shrugged and said,”Looks like we’ll just have to take out more blood from you than the others to thin it out” and laughed. I sat there with a Botox-infused smile and a urine stain on my crotch. I’m just kidding. About the Botox-infused smile.

A fun part of giving blood is to try to guess which dude is going to start spinning around and collapse while during his charity. This time around it was a spikey-haired kid who normally would look pretty cool under any circumstance, except for the circumstance of having to be carried away by two diminuitive nurses. I started laughing at how he was reacting like a little girl, until I was met with the dirty looks of the two little girls next to me. Bitches, can’t you take a little joke?

Anyway, the way this all relates to the recent surge in weighty posts (might I remind you, however, that there were only two of them), is that I think it was “Stupid Eric” that donated those 200 CCs, and what remained was a surplus of “Emo Eric” blood in my system. Now that the ugly yellow bruise on my forearm is going away (after three weeks, which scared the bejeezus out of me for a while there), it seems like “Emo Eric” has subsided while “Stupid Eric” has surged back into the limelight! My four loyal readers can breathe a sigh of relief. There are many more interesting observations about the differences between Chinese and American culture in such mundane things as giving blood, ordering pizza, and public displays of nose-hair picking. There are many more anecdotes, stories, and legends to bring forth about Shanghai onto the Internet. And there is only one person who can bring that to you, and his name is Dan Washburn.

I wait at his feet waiting for his scraps to fall to me.