Light My Fire

I don't know what to write about tonight...so I guess I'll tell one of my favorite, most thrilling stories from college. The first time my dorm set fire. It happened twice that year, the second time causing more lasting damage, but the first time was particularly harrowing for moi.

At the time me, my roomate, and the kids across the hall had all decided that we should make our two rooms into a commune. We put all the beds in one room. Three of us put our matresses on the floor to make one big bed and we made our arch-enemy, the baby talkng girl, sleep alone up on the top of a bunk bed. We put all the desks in the other room, so we had a bedroom and a workroom, and with the addition of a pair of pet mice it was a messy, stinky pit.

This was when we started our sandwich business. We stole ingredients from the cafeteria and made fliers. We'd deliver peanut butter and banana sandwiches to your dorm room at any hour day or night. If people had seen the conditions those sandwiches were made under we certaintly wouldn't have had so many calls, but as it was we were reeling in the dough--100% profits and we spent it all on pot.

The night of the fire I was at my desk in the work room. My semester paper was due very soon, so I was sitting in front of my computer procrastinating. The stereo was on and I was talking on the phone. The door was shut and everyone else was across hall. As I sat by my computer, in front of the window, fire truck pulled up on the lawn. "Woah," I exclaimed "something is on fire!" I went back to my conversation and a few seconds later another trunk pulled up, I noticed all the kids standing outside, "Wow, something really is on fire!" I said as I stood up and leaned against the window to get a better look.

A security guard on the lawn caught my eye. He started waving at me furiously, "oh my God!" I yelled, "I've got to get out of the building!" I hung up and ran out into the hallway expecting to see my other commune members, but everyone was gone. They'd left without me! I didn't have time to put my shoes on even though it was late November. I ran into the stairwell and found that it was completely filled with black smoke, "Oh My God!" I exclaimed again, but before I could do anything an arm emerged from the smoke. It was the security guard. He grabbed me and we ran down the pitch black stairs. I ran out of the building and across the wet lawn.

I stood outside in my stocking feet staring at the flames filling one of the first floor bedrooms. The fire raged for quite a while and I was forced to retreat into the tea house to warm my feet. Eventually the flames went out and the damage wasn't so bad. My friends all told me that they'd thought I'd already left the building. The next day I called my teacher and asked for an extension on my paper. She gave it to me, I think mostly because she wanted to hear what happened. It turned out a girl on the bottom floor had left a lit cigarette (we're not sure what kind) in an ashtray and it somehow rolled out into the closet catching on her highly flamiable wardrobe.

A Merry Xmas to you all...

The half drunk british man at the counter just announced that there's 10 minutes till closing. Ohhh, and how emabarrassing his collegue just shutdown the computer next to me, hope he didn't read the 1/2 drunk part. I guess I'm slightly tipsy me-self. I'm heading home early tomorrow. I'm not sure what to say about the trip overall, except that I already feel like it never happened. I feel like all week I've been looking in through a window, like in A Christmas Carol. Did I learn that all along I've been an awful scrooge? I don't think I've felt much of anything really. That's how it is when you're a tourist. You see so much it all blends together and pretty soon it's as if you haven't seen anything at all. Oh well, maybe I'll come back again someday.

December Blast

All day there has been nonstop storm coverage on the news. One station is calling it the December Blast. They keep urging everyone to stay inside. It's ridiculous, there isn't even that much snow!

This morning I woke up at 9:30 am. I was having a nightmare about Oprah. Something about her being a coke addict in the past and there was old footage of her. She was maybe 14 years old and somehow doing drugs had made her head swell up so that it was a huge bulbos globe, like a South Park character's head. Her features were all squished into the center of her face and nearly swallowed up by her fat head, her eyes and nose looked like raisins pressed into dough. She was flailing about and holding her big head, like maybe she couldn't breath.

I couldn't get the image out of my head, so I really had no choice but to get up. All I wanted to do was watch some saturday morning cartoons, but all that was on was live coverage of snowflakes falling at the Scarsdale train station and some Japanimation crap.

I feel like I need to say something more about the death of Jonathan Brandis star of Lady Bugs. Tiger Beat voted him heart throb of the year once. I always thought he looked like he was wearing black eyeliner. I found a creepy blog about him, written by his #1 fan. I hope it isn't true that his acne medication made him crazy driving him to sucide. Acne really sucks.