Finding Myself in a Strange Bed

There's nothing more disturbing than sitting on a couch one minute then waking up in a strange bed in a room you don't recognize the next. I have absolutely no memory of how I got there. Thank goodness the person to whom the bed belonged wasn't there for the weekend. That would've been awkward. But let me rewind here, and at least tell of how I got to this classic blackout.

Thursday was the last day of classes for me this quarter. I only had (and still have) to look forward to two papers, due on Monday and Friday. Easy enough. I went to my 9:15 and got the assignment for the paper due for that class (on Monday). Then I went to work. But even work was far from ordinary on at the end of the quarter.

In lieu of a picture of me making cotton candy, here's one of a disturbing-looking Dutch gentleman.

You see, we were putting on an "Apartment Fair" that day, where realtors from around the area were invited to talk to students in the indoor quad of Curry Student Center. My job was, it ended up, to make cotton candy. The machine spun around webs of cotton candy into the air that stuck onto my shirt and in my hair. Sometimes, when I had just added sugar, it would fly into my mouth and up my nose. Most pleasant. Several people I knew came by to laugh. But I was quite popular with random high school kids there for a model UN thing, since I was giving out the stuff for free.

After my last class, my 4:05 on Tolkien and C. S. Lewis, my professor invited anyone who wanted to come to Stars across the street (she wanted to go to a pub that was a little bit farther off, but it was snowing pretty hard out). We were all invited, if of proper age, to have a drink with her and talk about the last two books in the Chronicles of Narnia - The Magician's Nephew and The Last Battle - which had not been on our syllabus. I'd only read half of The Magician's Nephew at the time, but I decided to go anyway, and listen on. I couldn't miss, anyway, a chance to have a drink with a professor as the latest treat of being 21. It turns out I was the only one there who had read any of either book. There was little conversation on C. S. Lewis.

Ah, the things that pornography brings to the world of high art.

Instead, it was alot more interesting. We were talking about sex in Tolkien and the personality differences in siblings (first, middle, youngest children... Professor Kelly is a firm believer that these differences are quite real). There was even some funny talk about other English teachers, such as one Shakespeare teacher who is absolutely afraid of talking about sex in class, and some wondering, if the English department had a big party, which teacher would get wasted. Professor Kelly wouldn't commit to a pick, but another student insisted on Professor Peterfreund, a goofy-looking and soft-spoken, but hardcore, intense scholar who is into Keats and the romantic poets.

By the end, one of the other students was obviously wasted, and the conversation was getting wild. I only drank one beer, because I didn't feel like paying three dollars per. Professor Kelly left after about an hour and a half, and I wandered home after about ten or twenty more minutes hanging out with these kids I don't normally hang out with, vaguely wanting to get drunk sometime this weekend. The first thing Bullock said when I got back to the apartment was "we should get wasted tomorrow."

I worked for 6 hours or something on Friday. Jessie (my co-op boss) had to fly to Malaysia to pick up her grandmother who needs to come to the states for medical treatment and Monique (my main boss) had to fly to Ohio because of a death in the family. So I was there, with another work-study, holding down the fort. I did alot of reading.

Just as Captain Morgan's is my mortal enemy, Bacardi is my dearest friend.

When I finally got to go home, people were ready to get started on the mad plotting. Me and four other guys decided to enter a blood pact and drink Bacardi 151. OH HOW IT WOULD BE THE DEATH OF US. But I was tired from work, and wanting to take a hardcore break before having to write the essays due next week, so I thought death was just about the perfect idea.

Bacardi 151 always hits you unexpectedly. See, right off the bat, it doesn't seem to be doing anything. Then, all of the sudden, it hits you all at once. I went from sober to trashed in about 5 minutes. For awhile I was taking it easy. I, as people said later on, putting the mack on this girl. Yea, I always put the mack on one girl or another when I am drunk. Afterwards, I am scared that I was being too sleazy or something. People don't seem to mind it, though.

I really had no desire to come up with a picture to go with this paragraph, so here's one of Godzilla and his good friend King Ghidorah.

Well, I'm sitting next to this girl one second on the couch. The very next thing I know - it seemed immediate - I am laying in bed. It looks like my room, but the bed is in the wrong position. The clock and the window are right next to me instead of down the bed some. It's 8:00 in the morning. I realize the covers are not mine. I have no idea why I am there. It takes me a good minute to figure out where I am - the single immediately below mine, in the room I'd been drinking in. I wonder if someone put me there because I'd refused to walk upstairs. That turns out not to be the case. I guess I'd just figured it had been my own room and walked in there myself in my drunkenness.

I'm glad the explanation ended up being so mundane, but I'm still unnerved at the whole huge gap in my memory. Maybe I shouldn't drink Bacardi 151 too often... Or maybe I should drink it CONSTANTLY. Yea, that's the ticket.