K. Praslowicz dabbles with self-vampirism to save his own life:

One afternoon when I was about seven or eight I approached my friend Dan & Jon on the playground as they were in the middle of a conversation about dying from blood loss. Up until this point I had no clue about the role of blood in keeping a person alive, so this new fact that I learned about blood loss being causing death was astonishing, and scared me real bad.

Why would such a fact terrify a young boy you say? Well, my child mind didn’t quite get the facts straight. I had taken it that the loss of a single drop of blood meant instant death. Jonathon cleared this confusion up a bit and informed me that a single drop off blood wouldn’t cause me to die, but perhaps a small jar full of blood lost would do me in.

This new fact was often on my mind for a while, and eventually came to a head one day when my nose started bleeding of the blue. Fearful of dying from blood loss, I grabbed a small plastic Tupperware container and let my nose bleed into it.

The Tupperware container now became perverse backwards hourglass that held all of my attention as I dripped closer and closer to imminent death from blood loss. How big was the death jar was Jonathan talking about? Was it half the size of the one I had? Was it larger? I figured that I wouldn’t know until it was too late, and that was unacceptable.

Unfamiliar with the workings of human digestive and circulatory systems, the most rational thing I could come up with while holding a small jar of my blood to save my life was that if the blood didn’t remain outside of my body, I wouldn’t die from losing it.

Bottoms up!

Sam writes in:

When I was a child, my mother had little discretion with regards to what I watched on television. As a result, I lived on a regular diet of violent and sexually explicit content.

At the age of 6 or 7, I asked her about the actors who were shot and killed on these shows and why they would voluntarily give up their lives for television roles. I think it was the fake blood that threw me.

How did I make it through 2nd grade?