Day 35
I woke up today and first checked facebook (I know I'm a 14 year old) and then my email. After I sifted through all the passive aggressive messages from my boss I found an email stating that a professor of mine was to give a lecture...in the physics building. I slapped on my running shoes (yes, I have running shoes, you don't HAVE to use them for actual running) and trotted off to the physics building. I burst through the doors and looked around, it was perfect. The building looked exactly like a high school that should have been torn down 20 years ago because of an asbestos problem. It even had ugly green lockers lining the walls. Well, the lockers lined the walls except for where there were doors or giant framed photographs of physics students in matching sweaters. PARADISE.
After my buzz dropped I entered a huge lecture hall filled with 18 year olds and asked the girl next to me if I was in the right spot, she gave me confirmation and I joined her in the back row. She gave me her life story (this was her first college course, this was English 102, they were reading my professor's novel, she didn't like licorice, and she was an undecided Liberal Arts major). We became fast friends because for some silly reason she was mesmorized by the fact that I was a grad student who knew the author and wrote stories myself. I didn't tell her that if offered to wear a physics matching sweater and pose with geeky, vaguely Asian whizkids I'd switch programs immediately.
My instructor saw me and gave a wave, but my friend wasn't looking, damn she would've been impressed. Anyway, he started to speak and I watched the undergrads either text message secretly, or take diligent notes not knowing that what my instructor said was a well-polished speech, as he's said the same things every time he had been asked to speak. (At least that's what he said at the bar the other day) But, the magic was enticing, I was jealous of not being able to live in that illusion anymore. Everything was rolling along and it started; the girl in front of me with the stringy black hair started to cough.
Being obsessive compulsive I marked down a tally. Then it began, every thirty seconds someone else in the room of 200 started coughing. The girl ahead of me winning out the contest. I watched people flinch a little and lean away from her. I had to quit the tally as I didn't have enough paper. I couldn't even hear the talk anymore. My mind was filled with the question, "How do I move seats without making a scene." I spent the entire rest of the lecture imagining tiny little bits of virus crawling all over my stuff and setting up camp in my throat. I wanted to yell, "Go home you selfish whore." In hindsight, I should've or at least put on rubber gloves and a surgical mask and dragged her out by her stringy hair. But, since the polite passiveness of Canadians has now set to invading my system I just sat there and didn't do a thing.
After I contracted a multitude of viruses I met up with some friends to go and visit the exotic environment of the Computer Science lab. Lately, I've had an obsession with laboratories, which could've been contracted from seeing a photograph of a pretty Scandanavian man in a lab coat holding his test tube. Every time I ask him to take me, he gives me an excuse or laughs as though I am joking so, I had to settle for the Computer Science lab. Which turned out to be quite the adventure.
I followed my guides (three men, yeah that's right) through a few corridors and into a door. Upon walking in you could see a large velour couch which I am certain everyone in the program dreams of having sex on but never does (I thought of it as well). I heard the Computer Science lab was just a room full of computers, it's true. But, what nobody told me was that it was also full of men. It was just like walking into a comic book store. I was gawked at and at the same time, pretended not to be noticed. It could've been my voice, but I'd like to think it was my striking beauty, that turned heads. Anyway, I asked if there were any women and was immediately met with the responses "the women sit over there at those two desks" and "we sent them to a conference."
After staring at the tape "chalk" outline of a body on the floor and thinking about how they said that they had sent the women away I decided that I had had enough of the Computer Science lab for awhile. Really, these men are there all day with themselves and they send away the only females around, freaky.
A friend and I decided after our hard day (her studying me adventuring and nearly getting mauled by blood-thirsty geek squads with keyboard weapons and dirty, slut couches) that we should rent a movie. She dragged me into a videostore on a shady street corner. I will never be the same. They had everything and it was organized to the point that one knew that the person who organized those movies spent years devoting their thoughts to what would be the absolute best system. Luckily, the man behind it all was there AND he liked crappy B horror spoof movies from the 1980's.
Having finally found my piece of utopia I was surprisingly full of questions...Would building countless shrines to the organizational man for the rest of my life fall under having false gods? Would it be ridiculous if I had to drop out of grad school because all I could do from today until I die is watch movies from that videostore? How do you ask someone if you can pay them 1,000 bucks a month to live in the American Directors section?
I strolled onto the bus wondering if it had all really happened. After awhile I realized that I didn't care if it did, I believed. My heart sank in grief, if only I would've been born in this glorious land years of my movie-obsessed life wouldn't have been wasted. If only, if only...
After supper a few friends and I watched the Disney version of Alice in Wonderland. I hadn't seen this flick in years. I can now fully understand why the "it was all a dream" endings are scruitinized for being lazy. But, I learned a valuable lesson contained in the subtext of this story, it's really just a pro-anorexia propaganda film. I should've known, how could I have missed it? If only could be a certain size she could fit into the world's she wanted to be in. If she was too big she couldn't move and if she was small she could fit through doors and hear the pretty flowers sing. Plus, when she wanted to get small she drank a liquid that looked like water (a staple beverage of anorexics) but, when she got big she usually ate something that looked more like a cookie and the message was clearly printed on it, "Eat Me".
I know what you are gonna say, but she did eat the carrot in the house to get small and she took a bite of mushroom to get big. Well, think about it...it's a Disney film she couldn't starve to death plus, anorexics like carrots and mushrooms are really just drugs. Far-fetched about the mushrooms, you say? Think about how f-ed up the Mad Hatter, Door Mouse and Rabbit were, what kind of tea do you think they were drinking in a forest...hmmm?
-Canadian Castaway
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