7 Quick Takes Friday - on selling my body, monkey business, and a coffee recommendation

---1---

On selling my body.... As I've mentioned before, I'm looking for a second job since school is out. Until I find one, I decided maybe I would try donating plasma...and I did in fact try, last Friday. My brother was horrified. "You've sunken to selling your body?!" he exclaimed. "Well, yes...I guess you could look at it that way," I replied humorously. I was surprised that it did not hurt. The needle going in the arm was just a slight stick, and then it was relatively painless. However, I failed to hydrate as well as I should have, and since I work third shift and went to the place not long after I woke up Friday around noon, all I ate beforehand was a granola bar, and that only because the instructions say to eat well before you donate. Well, I learned they tell you that for a reason. I passed out after they had only drawn what looked to me like maybe 6 or 7 ounces of plasma. I still got the full payment, which I thought was generous, and the nursing staff there are so great. I highly recommend CSL Plasma. I'm going tomorrow to try again :). I will be drinking a lot of water tonight (and have been all week) and will eat plenty of healthy food before I go!

---2---

On selling my body more literally.... A couple of years ago at Christmastime I took care of a home health patient who was dying of a particularly aggressive form of cancer. He decided to donate his body to science - I think I even got a glimpse of the paperwork for it. The idea was that with medical research, maybe someone in the future could be saved, even though he couldn't. I thought it was rather heroic. I have had discussions with other people about the subject of donating one's body to science after death, too. One of them told me some organizations will pay you tens of thousands of dollars to do it. I thought that was interesting, especially since the body must be given appropriate treatment in a very short time after death in order to be usable...there must be a way to ensure it will be usable if that much money is paid out in advance.... I will have to look that up.

 

In high school I went to the cadaver lab at Heidelberg University in Tiffin, Ohio, with my Anatomy and Physiology class. It was a strange experience to me at the time - the thing I remember most about it was the strong smell of the preservatives, and the campus was mulching its landscaping, so now everytime I smell mulch I think of that field trip. I was fairly grossed out by it. But I also remember how much respect was shown to the bodies. Their "identifying" parts were kept covered - hands, faces, genitalia, etc., unless that is the portion of the body under immediate observation. Also, they keep every part of the body (skin included - I'm sorry if that is too much information, but it's true) and return it all to the family for proper burial or other closure. I think it is a very respectful process that can lead to a lot of good for medical discovery. I am totally considering it.

---3---



And the "monkey business".... This portion of "Quick Takes" is brought to you by my propensity for dreaming crazy dreams. I had the last couple of nights off, and this was one of those weeks where I caught up on a lot of sleep over my "weekend". I think I dreamed of every person I ever knew, from family to friends and coworkers and people I went to school and church with in various places...and their dogs...and a monkey. Yep, someone in my dream this afternoon even had a pet monkey. I did not recognize the person in the dream, but upon waking I realized that my grandma used to tell me about someone we knew who had pet monkeys at some point. So I called her to solve the mystery.

 

(This is the kind of monkey that was in my dream...until it
turned into some sort of strange cross between a monkey and
a dog.... When I looked up the picture just now, it was captioned "organ
grinder," and that clicked with a street-art picture I saw earlier today on facebook,
so I guess that's why I was dreaming about a monkey. Hmm.)

It was my great-grandparents, her in-laws (my mom's dad's parents). My educated guess for the time frame of this adventure was the late 1960s or early '70s. They started out with one monkey, with a really long tail, and named it Dopey. From what my grandma tells me, Dopey had a strange diet. Among these items were raw onions and hard boiled eggs. When he would get an onion, before he ate it he would rub it all over his body - I guess he liked the smell (I would NOT have liked that monkey; the smell of onions disgusts me). When he would get an egg, he would crack it over his head, peel, and eat. And because he ate hard-boiled eggs and also had a propensity for getting out of his cage when my great-grandparents weren't home, they often arrived home to find egg all over the place where he had mistakenly cracked a raw egg over his head instead of a hard-boiled one. When my mom and her brother would go to visit their grandparents, Dopey had a habit of sticking his tail out of his cage and using it to steal any food they happened to have, too.

 

Later, they got two more monkeys, newborn, named Danny and Debby. These had clipped tails (you know how that's the style for some dog breeds? Well, apparently it is for some monkey breeds, too). My great-grandma used newborn diapers for them. My grandma was telling me about it and she said, "Bobby [her third child, born in '65 or '66] was the only one of my kids that they had made disposable diapers by the time he came along, and she [my great-grandma] told me I was too lazy to wash real diapers for him...and then she went and bought them for her monkeys!"

 

They had the monkeys for a couple of years and then donated them to the Columbus (Ohio) Zoo. I guess they got to be too much to take care of...apparently there is a good reason you don't know too many people who keep monkeys as pets.

 

---4---

And other strange pet news...mine are trying to kill me. A few weeks ago I started finding multi-colored push-pins (like you use on a bulletin board) on the floor every now and then. I looked all over my apartment and could not figure out where they were coming from. Earlier this week I moved a small desk out of the living room into my office to use until I bring up my larger office desk from my friends' garage in Joplin, and there beside it was the box of push-pins which the cat had evidently knocked off at some point and the dog was dragging out little by little. So I picked them all up...or so I thought. Since then I have found two or three clear ones by "surprise." By "surprise" I mean very unpleasant surprise...with my bare feet.

---5---

Last night (Wednesday night) I visited a friend's church in Marshfield (about half an hour from my house). It was a small group Bible study setting. They are in the Minor Prophets, and the subject was Nahum. After spending the last 11 years of my life in school studying the Bible, I did not know Nahum is about Ninevah and is a sort of sequel to Jonah, and Jonah is one of my favorites. So there - you can learn something new every day, even about subjects people think you already know very well! ;) Also, the pastor made the comment that the words "jealous" and "zealous" come from the same root word. My friend whispered jokingly "-eal?" (It was funny - you just had to be there.) Now I really want to know that root word! (Awesome church, by the way!)

---6---

For my 30th birthday (about a year and a half ago) several of my friends gave me Starbucks gift certificates, and I still had a couple of them left, so this week I bought a new flavor of coffee from there with one of my certificates. It was the 3-Region Blend. I highly recommend it - so good!! It comes in a pretty bag, too :).



---7---

And here I was going to rant about the online job application process...which is sometimes extremely frustrating...but instead, I will spare you and just post a couple of videos of a song and its remake that I really like both of. "All My Tears" - I believe the writer of the song was Buddy Miller.

 

First as performed by the writer's sister, Julie Miller (I couldn't find one of her performing or without someone else's video in it, but here ya go):

 

 

And remade more recently by Jars of Clay:
 

  

For more great Quick Takes, visit Jennifer at Conversion Diary!