Circulatory system

A few weeks ago I took the bus down to BYU to listen to a forum speaker I was interested in and to have dinner with my friend Emily.

This was the first time I'd done any significant people-watching since returning to Utah (a daily if not hourly occurrence on the busy streets and subways of New York City). I had been to a baseball game a couple of weeks earlier, but I was pretty sick that night and didn't pay much attention to the crowd.

As I made my way to the Marriott Center and found a seat, I kept thinking I saw familiar faces. But I was always wrong; in six or so hours I spent on campus, I didn't see anyone I knew. I'm sure my desire to bump into old friends or teachers was a big part of my eyes misleading me, but I think there was another reason: the students at BYU in 2009 do look almost exactly the same as BYU students did in 2004.

The combination of prevailing whiteness, the desire of Utah college students to look like they come from California, and the dress and grooming guidelines present in the BYU Honor Code result in A LOT of Stepford students. Especially the guys. For white guys at BYU, there seem to be two basic stylistic templates: preppy and American Eagle catalog model. Virtually every guy's look is at best a slight adaptation of one or the other. (Adding glasses to the preppy look gives you a third subcategory, nerd.)

But after attending the forum, I learned there is another reason for this sameness. The speaker was Neil deGrasse Tyson, head of the Hayden Planetarium in New York and the most entertaining non-entertainer I know of. (Check out some of these clips to see what I mean.) As part of his presentation, he described how we drink the same molecules of water and breathe the same molecules of oxygen that Jesus and Lincoln drank and breathed (it apparently takes about 100 years for the molecules in any single glass of water to be distributed across the globe). We are in the universe, and the universe is in us--we are all made of the same stuff. Therefore, it shouldn't be surprising that we all look the same (he didn't say that last part; I jumped to that conclusion all by myself).

This thought came back to me later that same week, when I donated blood for the first time. I had always been under the impression that, due to my childhood health issues and accompanying blood transfusions, as well as my time spent in Scotland, I was ineligible to give blood. It turns out I was misled, or the Red Cross has relaxed their standards.

Allie (by far the cutest of the blood-letting tech-people working that day) asked me all about my sexual history, determined I was an acceptable donor, and strapped me down on a chair. Neither of my arms had easily accessible veins; she finally found access through a side vein, and my blood began to fill the bag. Slowly. They apparently measure blood flow on a scale of 1 to 10, 10 being the fastest. Mine was never higher than a 3.

I guess my blood is both shy and stingy. Or maybe it just really wants to stay in my body. It makes sense--the water and oxygen that help make up my blood have been travelling around the world and through the vessels of billions of people over millions of years, and it knows that it's never going to have it as good as it does while pumping through my body.