...I gave some and then got some?

Give blood.

Seriously -- for whatever that word is worth in this context -- if you can, you should. It's free, for a start, and unlike most other things you can donate it's very unlikely that it'll end up hocked for cough syrup. Blood is like money: you don't really appreciate it until you need some and can't get it.

Actually, that's a bad analogy. Blood isn't like money. Nobody ever won the love of strangers and the hatred of friends by amassing enormous quantities of blood. Opening a vein on a first date doesn't impress anybody. No ... a better comparison would involve something that you want to always have plenty of, but which you'd never devote your life to acquiring. And except for that last part, it seems to me that blood is a lot like sex.

So yes, two key parts to today's memory. The first involved watching my own disturbingly dark life-juice being sucked out through my elbow. The second involved La Petite Boheme, who -- after asking if I wanted to watch 'National Treasure' (which I did, because Sean Bean rocks my world) -- made it very clear that if I wanted to actually see any of the movie I'd have to do it over, under, or around her very much alive body.

Anyway, while Nic Cage and some anonymous blonde science-woman were dashing around setting fire to things I was busy discovering a new twist on an old idea. Now, the Arcimedian Principle states that an old Greek guy and his rubber duck will displace an amount of bathwater equal to their own cubic volume. Conversely, the band-aid-and-condom principle states that you have only so much blood in your body, and if you want to displace some of it to a particular location you're going to find yourself lacking somewhere else.

Now, all credit to the ever-astonishing LPB. But 'lightheaded' is a sex-symptom that's only supposed to go so far, and suffice it to say that if I (sulking at not being allowed to watch the movie) hadn't insisted on being on the bottom, the evening might have ended very disappointingly. Blinking back stars, I was reminded of my high school biology classes: blood carries oxygen. And I was fresh out. Hence the fuzzy blackness at the corners of my vision.

And then I noticed something else. And this may all have been imagination, or possibly just more credit to the ever-astonishing LPB, but ... it was really good. I mean ... really, in a field where greatness is the norm. And that put me in mind of the high school biology lessons you hear outside the classrooms, or that Chuck Palahniuk story that I can't even think about anymore. Now, I'm not the adventurous sort -- my adventures in oxygen deprivation begin and end with the little 'I Gave' sticker. But still.

Give blood.

Trust me.