Notice
"Jared, I don't mean to interrupt because I know you're working on your thesis,
but could you drop what you're doing and bring me some jello?"
--Amanda
1)There's a worm on my candy wrapper!
2)I'm so not kidding!
3)I was going to write about Maine, but there's a worm!
4)I love peppermint patties, right?
5)So I got some for my lab (pure altruism, really) and I had a few left over.
6)I just took a bite of one and set it back on the wrapper to type.
7)Then I picked it up and took another bite.
8)When I looked down to set it back on the wrapper, there was a worm!
9)On the wrapper!
10)Okay, I just met my roommate coming back from moving her laundry and explained the situation.
11)This is while I was releasing the worm into the wild.
12)I told her all I could think of was my sister's belief that, "the only thing worse than finding a worm in your food is finding half a worm."
13)Now my roommate's calling her boyfriend to get some jello.
14)Last night he had a barbecue, and she made jello.
15)It's still at his house, and once we decided that the worm probably came from the acorns on my desk, not the candy, and thus I was free to eat the rest of the candy, she was like, "I could really go for some jello right now."
16)So I told her to call her boyfriend and tell him to bring it over.
17)She did.
18)He said he'd be right over.
19)It then took her five minutes to explain that she was joking, and no of course she didn't want him to bring it over, she just wanted to know what he would say.
20)It was almost as funny as our conversation about Maine earlier, which is what I was originally going to mention.
21)Basically, my roommate lives on the edge of this little town.
22)We'll call it Hulatown, to protect her from potential stalkers.
23)So she lives in Hulatown, but she's so close to the border that she doesn't have a Hulatown phone number.
24)It's actually a Narf phone number; Narf of course being the neighboring town that she lives near.
25)Now, the point of this is that it's a long distance call from Narf to Hulatown.
26)You can see where I'm going with this.
27)She can call any number of neighboring towns for free, but it's long distance to talk to people in her own hometown.
38)"Maine is a weird place," she says.
29)This was after she'd explained that Hulatown is really very big, in terms of land area, even though only about fifty people live there.
30)So it takes her forty minutes to drive across town, and only twenty to get to Augusta.
31)Augusta is, of course, Maine's capitol.
32)She says she can make it to the center of town in the same amount of time it would take her to reach the capitol building.
33)"Not," she admits, "that the center of town is very exciting. I mean, there's a stop sign."
34)I was like, "Wow, you have a stop sign? We have a field."
35)I bet it has lots of worms in it, too.
36)Maybe even some jello, on fair days.
Run Away