I don’t like opening up my tumblr and seeing a “0” under my tumblarity. It screams “Melia is lazy” and since I’m opposed to reblogging because I just think it’s bizarre my tumblarity stays at zero. I’m having a hard time here though.I don’t like being labeled zero.
I think I’ve been mistaking laziness for writer’s block. I used to think I had writer’s block in high school when I didn’t want to perform my senior editing duties and rewrite a freshman’s shitty article about last Friday’s football fame. A) I know nothing about sports to be editing a sports article and B) if your grammar skills are reminiscent of that of a 7th grade special ed student then maybe journalism isn’t the class for you. A remedial English class would perhaps fit your needs better.
I have a lot of material- that’s why I started this blog. But 10 minutes into the writing process, I find myself searching for the latest puff pasty recipes on tastespotting. See, I just wasted five minutes watching a Mad Men episode I just watched. It doesn’t take much to distract me. I think calling it ADD would be going to far. Individuals with ADD often have bad manners such as talking during movies, chasing wild ducks around the pond at the park and playing bumper carts with unsuspecting customers at the grocery store. Whenever I’m around someone with ADD I feel like I’m being set up for a future episode of “Boiling Points” but the 100 dollar win never comes. It doesn’t matter anyway because I never would’ve won that money because moments after this lunatic starts chatting up total strangers at the gas station I’ve already used the work fuck fourteen times. I have manners. But I will say my attention span rivals that of a five year old hopped up on a grande Starbucks’ Christmas blend. And if you’ve ever had the Christmas blend on an empty stomach you know what it feels like to go from 0-60 in a matter of minutes. I find that when I eat before I drink that coffee, my heart has a less likely chance of exploding like a failed meth house.
I like painting my nails because it makes me feel chic but I never want to sit down long enough to do it. By the time I get the first coat on my left hand I’m bored and the never ending laundry list of things I need to do suddenly comes to the front of my thoughts. I’m pretty good at pushing those aside, so the forgotten things like that three month old unopened Marie Claire magazine comes to mind and before that first coat has even dried, I find myself trying to open the plastic covering the magazine came in with my one free hand and my teeth. I get bored. And boredom clearly breeds stupidity.
Halloween 2003. Classic case of stupidity brought on by severe boredom. Fall of 2003 was my first semester of college and instead of experimenting with Jager and pot like most normal freshmen, my roommates and I prank called boys from the water polo team and executed midnight missions of finding out where boys we liked live. And to think four of the most socially awkward girls were randomly placed in a suite together. I can’t wrap my head around it some times. Because I couldn’t have asked for better roommates. There were actually eight of us, but the other four don’t really count because we pretty much forgot about them and one of them was a beast of a tennis player from Germany. So she really doesn’t count.
My roommate Sarah* came up with most of our “activities”. She was an artist- very creative and although I wouldn’t call her manipulative because that just sounds evil, she had no problem convincing us that her activities weren’t only going to be fun but that we’d never get caught. It was like being rallied by a charismatic televangelist. By the time she was done explaining something, you didn’t want to say no. But there was still caution. Our voice of reason was my other roommate Jen* who was some kind of science major from Korea. She had a good command over the English language because she’d been a foreign exchange student in Idaho during high school, however her personality trait of being blunt led to us often being verbally bitchslapped by her. She was the one filling in the blank con list after Sarah had rallied us into doing something ridiculous and just before Jen gave in to whatever it was she would usually ask us if we were “retarded” or “fucking stupid.” I loved how some of the first words the International students would pick up were ones that get a kindergarten a swift slap to the mouth.
Halloween 2003 was the first and last time I carved a pumpkin. Sarah was offended I’d never carved one and asked what kind of childhood I’d had. I told her my childhood was spent being the fat kid in my dance class and that my mom never took me trick or treating because Halloween was the devil’s holiday. We usually spent “Harvest Day” as my mom called it at our church getting the shitty halloween candy instead of hitting up neighborhoods that were getting full sized candy bars and had long ago stopped torturing kids with those orange marshmallow peanuts that all kids hate. I was 13 the first and last time I went trick or treating. I was supposed to be a “freak” that year which basically meant I got to wear makeup, dig up my ugliest clothes and run house to house in my best friend’s neighborhood begging elderly men and women for candy. Needless to say, we got turned down at a couple of houses because no one wants to give candy to a chubby teenager wearing clown makeup, fishnets and doc martens. It looked more like I was soliciting violent sex instead of trying to fill up my pillowcase with Starbursts and Milky Ways.
Out of pity for me, we went down to the one grocery store in town, got a medium sized pumpkin and one of those pumpkin carving kits with the makeshift tools that couldn’t even assist in a successful suicide. We went back to our dorm and Sarah did most of the work while I watched with Jen and our other roommate Lily*. When Sarah was done it looked like the pumpkin had projectile vomitted all over the table and living room floor, but she was so proud. We all applauded her for making that two inch “knife” work for her even though it bent every time she tried to make a new incision into the pumpkin. I’m sure we named it, I don’t remember, I just remember being glad that I’d never done that growing up because that pumpkin smelled like it died.
“Well this thing can’t really be complete if we don’t light it,” Sarah announced examining her work.
“What do you mean light it?” Jen asked. “What the fuck do you mean, ‘light it’? Like on fire?”
“It’s a jack-o-lantern dummy,” Sarah said. “Lantern means its lit up. We’re not going to light it on fire. The fire is on the inside. Do we have any candles?”
None of us had candles or anything that would safely start a small fire in the hollow of the pumpkin carcass, so one of us decided that paper towels would be the next best thing.
“You’re kidding right?” Jen asked. “That whole pumpkin is going to light up.”
“Oh shut up and get us some matches,” I barked at her even though I had some doubts and a vision flash of us standing outside of our dorm with the things we’d been able to carry out before it burned down.
We each wadded up some paper towels and put them in the pumpkin and used another paper towel rolled into a cone to light them. We should’ve smelled disaster when we had a difficult time putting out the makeshift lighter. The more we blew on it, the more cinders flew off of it scattering all over the floor leaving us no choice but to stomp them out with our feet. Lily made the smartest decision of the night to bring a large cup full of water over to put the small flame out with. She also took the incriminating picture for us.
While we were busy reveling in our entertainment for the evening, the flame got a little bigger than we intended and was starting to overtake the pumpkin. We dumped the water in however like all fires, when a flame gets snuffed it produces smoke. We didn’t think about that. So the four of us went to work flapping our arms like wild chickens to diffuse the smoke but we had made the unfortunate mistake of doing this activity directly under the smoke detector. It didn’t take long before the familiar ear-splitting sound of the fire alarm alerted the entire dorm that we were either having a drill or four stupid girls had set a defenseless pumpkin on fire.
When the alarm went off, it was like everything was happening in slow motion. I looked around at my accomplices and they all had the same “oh shit what have we done now?” expression on their face. The four of us started running around the suite, trying to be discreet about what had happened but there was no hiding the fact that we’d carved a pumpkin and attempted to make it into a porch-friendly Halloween decoration. There was evidence everywhere-it looked like a pumpkin patch murder scene. I’m not sure why we were running because no one was doing anything in particular- we each ran to our rooms as if we were mentally regrouping and then we all ran back out to the common area. There’s no kind of adrenaline like the kind that comes from fear. And even though I hadn’t done any running (or exercise for that matter) since the year before, I was running through the apartment like FloJo. If FloJo had committed arson.
“We’ve got to hide it!” Sarah screamed over the blaring alarm. “We’ve got to hide this thing!” Her eyes were watery and the fact that she was about to cry made me want to cry. And I really could’ve used a depends because my bladder was about to give my guilt away. My stomach hurt from nerves and the running and the overall sensation of impending doom.
“Where?” I screamed back. “There’s pumpkin shit all over the floor!”
“In the bathroom!” Lily screamed. She snatched the pumpkin off the table and shoved it under one of the bathroom stalls. There was a trail of seeds and innards marking the path she’d taken to hide it, and I was too frazzled to think about the fact that the firefighters who were going to storm our suite like gangbusters any minute would follow that trail like birds following breadcrumbs.
“Cover it, cover it!” I said pointing to the pumpkin. Lily sloppily draped a towel over the pumpkin before deciding that just wasn’t going to cut it. So she took one for the team and hid it under her bed. If that isn’t friendship, I really don’t know what is. The four of us were running in circles like recently escaped mental patients.
“I told you not to light it!” Jen said. “They’re going to kick us out of here!”
“Can they do that?” Lily asked, hands over her ears. “Oh God, I can’t get kicked out!”
“My mom is going to chop me up and bury me in the backyard! And she’ll make it look like an accident.” I said
My mom had reamed me over the phone for getting into an accident that involved me sliding down a hill after falling off a razor scooter sans helmet. You’d think that I’d pushed someone else down that hill, the way she was talking to me.
“What were you thinking? You don’t even ride a bike Melia.”
“We found it…”
“So you stole it, took it for a joyride and then you went tumbling down a hill as your punishment for theft.”
“Pretty much.”
“All this from the girl who can’t even walk four yards without tripping over her own feet.”
“Hence why I went sliding down the hill mom.”
I couldn’t even imagine having to explain to her that I’d been kicked out of college for partaking in a Halloween tradition that ended in arson. If anything, it was partially her fault for never carving a pumpkin with me to begin with. If I’d been able to tell Sarah, yes, I carved a pumpkin when I was eight and hated it, we wouldn’t be here, the fire alarm screaming accusations of us starting a fire indoors.
As we continued to scramble around the suite like rats in a maze, spraying air freshener to hide the scent of burn, our other roommates were calmly exiting the suite as if this was a standard fire drill. The German tennis player was onto us though.
“What is going on?!” She bellowed. The anger in her voice resonated over noise of the fire drill and I thought she was going to whip out a racket and backhand all of us.“What did you do?” She was standing in front of us in her sports bra and track pants holding her laptop demanding to know what’s going on. For someone who trained for hours every day, the least she could’ve done was suck in her gut to make it authentic. She had a Heineken gut. No one said anything to her and we continue to run around, in and out of rooms ignoring bratwurst Brigitta.
“Fire drill!” Jen yelled to her as she ran out the door. Lily followed quickly behind her laptop in arm, taking two stairs at a time to get out. Sarah grabbed my hand and we left Maria Sharapova’s ugly sister standing in the doorway of her room without an answer. Sarah held my hand the entire 3 flights of stairs down, her grip acting like a vice and practically cutting off the circulation to my fingers. She kept holding my hand once we got outside and to be honest I didn’t want to let go. It was nice to have someone to partner in fear with. At least if we got busted, we got busted together.
We made our best attempt to blend into the 50 or so girls who were now gathered on the front lawn wondering what dummy had set off the fire drill this late at night. Someone asked us what was going on and we shrugged, pretending not to know. Passersby had stopped to get in on the action because they had nothing better to do and this was only kind of entertainment that happened on our campus past 7 PM. The boys in the dorm next door were hanging out of their windows waiting to see if they were going to witness a James Bond moment when the entire building blew up or if they could catch any of the girls in their Victoria’s secret nightwear. The fire alarm going off is a big deal.
The firemen came, sirens waking up all who had fallen asleep attracting more spectators. If that wasn’t embarassing enough, they knew which suite the disturbance had originated in, so in front of everyone, all of the girls from F suite were asked to step forward.
“I’m going to cry,” Sarah whimpered.
“Shut up,” I snapped, “Don’t say anything.”
“We are fucked.”
“Just be cool.”
“You be cool!”
“I’m not crying.”
“Oh my God, we are so fucked!”
They burst into our dorm like it was a forest fire (which were not uncommon in our area so this was great training for them) and we were left with their leader and our resident advisor who were now trying to get out of us what had happened.
“Pumpkin,” I said when he asked if I knew why the alarm went off. “Pumpkin.”
“What pumpkin? What does that have to do with the alarm?” our advisor asked.
“Pumpkin,” Sarah said. “We carved one. Pumpkin. We got a kit from Ralph’s. Melia’s never carved one.” I could see Jen and Lily in the crowd watching us, ducking whenever the advisor looked in their direction. We were the only ones from our suite who stepped forward to take the hit for this enormous lifeslap of a situation. What came out of Sarah’s mouth next was so utterly ridiculous, even for a pathological liar like myself, that I couldn’t hide my bewilderment at the nonsense coming out of her mouth.
“Marshmallows!” she blurted out. “We were trying to make s’mores with a candle and the alarm went off.” She tightened her grip on my hand before I could say anything, but I wasn’t going to. I couldn’t form any words. Sarah however, kept talking, going on and on about how wonderful a burning marshmallow smells and how much she loved s’mores and how we were all just so hungry and wanted a snack. I kept nodding and trying to wipe the horror off my face because there was no way anyone was buying this.
“Ok...” the fire chief said in response to our nonsense marshmallow/pumpkin jabbering, clearly dense to the fact that we’d taken all the steps to create an accurate jack-o-lantern and were not in fact making s’mores. Our advisor was looking at us as if we’d just told her that we were trying to bake a pumpkin pie from scratch and cook it in our microwave.
“Ladies you know you shouldn’t even have candles,” our advisor said, a hint of pity in her voice. I think she genuinely felt bad for how stupid we were. “These alarms are sensitive.”
“We know and we are so sorry,” Jen cut in, finally stepping forward and claiming her status as one of the F suite ding dongs. “Won’t happen again.”
Minutes later, the firefighters emerged telling us it was safe to go back in. The fire chief told them that we’d been carving pumpkins, as if that provided any sort of explanation to the fire alarm being set off.
“Yeah we saw some pumpkin mess up there- seeds and stringy stuff…” one of them said. “But no pumpkin. It’s all clear.” The fire chief gave us one more confused look before shrugging and heading back to the truck with the rest of his crew.
Sarah squeezed my hand and we tried to stifle our joy. We were out of immediate danger. She let go of my hand and we shuffled back inside, heads down trying to hide our grins. As soon as we were out of earshot those grins dissolved into the giggles and then into hyena-like laughter. The four of us went from pants-wetting fear to pants-wetting joy. Nothing was funny while we were running around minutes earlier trying to come up with legitimate alibis, but now it had us laughing so hard we were snorting, crying and very close to having an infantile accident.
And no, we weren’t high when this happened. Or drunk. Drunk off of life maybe. Drunk off of boredom, definitely.
So lesson learned. Don’t carve pumpkins. Ever.
*Names have been changed for the protection of three silly girls who were thisclose to burning down an entire dorm at a nameless conservative college in Southern California.
