the lab

I just called my old lab to ask once again about filming there. I get so nervous when calling them it's really kind of funny. My hands shake, my breath gets short, and my heart races. I'm not even sure what I'm nervous about. maybe I'm nervous that they'll say no?

I first called them over two years ago to find out my donor number. 9 months later, after 5 or 6 calls they finally got it for me. I was so nervous when they finally gave it to me that i almost didn't remember it. At that point I wrote a letter to the lab requesting permission to shoot some footage there-which seems important to me as it's so central to this story. i was told that they needed a letter to present to the board. That letter was sent in November 2007 and I never heard back from them.

This morning i started to try and write up something about how i came to visit the lab, and i honestly can't remember when i first went. Was I still in college? i don't know. I realized it would help me out a great deal to see my file, so I called them back up. I don't think i ever followed up on the letter back in 2007.

I think that one of the reasons I'm so nervous is that it was always such an awkward experience to visit the lab. There wasn't a separate entrance for donors so we would buzz into the office, which was on the ground floor of a midtown manhattan brownstone. Upon entering, the receptionist would either buzz the inner door to the back hallway or nod for us to sit down and wait as the room was in use. So there we would sit, donors and clients. It would have been clear from my appearance at the time that i wasn't a client. I was probably in some kind of cut off shorts, and most likely sweating from riding my bike. I had long somewhat unkempt hair that might even have been purple or bright red. When the other donor, or wannabe father, left I was buzzed in to march down the hall of shame to the masturbation room.

Frankly i always felt like everyone looked down on the donors; the staff, the clients, even the doctors. We were the people who were going to do that thing that we weren't supposed to do and we were going to do it for money, and everyone knew it. i wouldn't say that i felt like a prostitute, but I didn't feel real welcome. It was an emotionally awkward experience to say the least, and the lab didn't work real hard to cushion that weirdness.

In any case, the woman that i talked to today was pretty nice, and she explained that the lab moved down the block in 2007, so that might explain the lack of proper communication. I'm re-faxing the letter and hopefully i will be able to go in and film myself reading through my information, and perhaps hear about what I heard at the time and what they do differently today. I just want to be able to explore my own story.