Fuck You

I caught a strain of dorm sickness over October break. It wasn't the flu, which was good, but it was one of those annoying coughing colds that have multiple stages of illness. First, your nose starts to run, which in most cases is manageable. In my case, however, my left eye also starts to water at inopportune moments.

One awkward instance took place last week in my Intro to French Literature 215 class. Basically all we do in this class is - big surprise - read French literature, which mainly involve love triangles and the death of either one or both of the lovers at the end. We were discussing one of the said deaths when suddenly, my left eye began to water. It would have been okay if my bangs didn't do such a superb job of covering up my right eye, thus making me look as if I was moved to tears at the death of two highly idealized and annoying characters.

The next stage of the cold is the nonstop coughing, which is pretty intense for a few days and then tapers off over a week or so. One night I was sitting in the common room with Muffin, a really adorable and super-Asian Korean girl who lives in this big-ass, corking great apartment triple when I started to hack away.

When I finished, Muffin said, "Bless you. Wait, that's just for sneezes. I don't think people say that when you cough. Do they?"

Being too busy groping for the tissues, I did not answer in the conventional way. Instead, I believe I said something along the lines of "Hurrrrrridunnlllouhuhewoeurog?" I tend to forget consonants when I'm sick. It must have been the virus affecting my brain, except colds are bacterial infections.

Muffin continued her train of thought. "No, I don't think you do. What would you say to a cough? Fuck you?"

I thought that was hilarious and laughed uproariously. Except in my coughing, inflamed-throat state, it only translated to more coughing, hacking, terrible lung-regurgitating noises, and intermittent howls of mirth. It was bad enough that I thought I would be mute by sundown the next day. Interestingly enough, by then most of it had already gone away.

But the original question was never answered, so I'll ask you now: what do you say to someone after a cough?

Pheonix Rising (The Layman's Term: Boy)

I go to a women's college. From an academic standpoint, the lack of men is pretty awesome. There's no testosterone flying around in the air and interrupting you while you're trying to make a deep and profound point about the connection between the self and political thought. (To the guys reading this, please don't think I hate you. On the contrary, I happen to like you very much. I've dated quite a few of your kind.) 

This is my visualization of testosterone. Imagine trying to speak up in class with that in the room.

On the social scene, however, the lack of men is not so hot (unless you don't prefer them to begin with, but that's a different story.) For a while, whenever my friends and I walked around campus, our eyes seeking in vain for the semblance of some masculine figure, we would groan and grumble to each other about how we would be celibate until graduation.

Luckily, it was not our fate to live like nuns for four years. My school has a consortium with four other colleges around the area. The first is another women's college. The other three of those schools have guys! And because the five colleges interchange students through classes, once in a blue moon we would catch sight of a guy sitting in a class. Or waiting for his lunch order. Or standing at the bus stop. Or walking around looking lost, or maybe just awed by our Lothlorien-like campus. I got kind of excited at these boy sightings. I mean, we all did, but in retrospect I think it might have been a little extreme to point excitedly while yelping "Boy!" in a high-pitched Japanese anime voice.

Eventually the solution was figured out by 006 (double-oh-six) and Panda, two clever girls from the dorm down the street. The trick was to think up of a good phrase that would be immediately obvious to those in the know, but otherwise unobtrusive to the innocent observer, in most cases the boy. The term coined was "Phoenix Rising". We used it liberally for a few days, and all was well.

Then one fine morning, the four of us - me, Purl, 006, and Panda - were strolling down the sidewalk of the village commons when lo! and behold, a dark, tall, sultry, resplendent, and Damn Smoking Gorgeous specimen of the male sex came our way. After we were done gaping, Purl turned to me and whispered in awe, "Red Hot Phoenix Rising." 

Now we had a basic rainbow color system to refine our observations, red being the hottest and violet for...not. 

I will also point out that Orlando Bloom as Legolas is more pretty than anything else. He is extraordinarily pretty in those movies.

Next comes Red Hot. This term is reserved for special sightings.

They are so cool and thoughtful.

Red Smokin' Hawt would be for...actually, I don't think we've come across one of those yet. That would be way off the charts and our brains would probably short-circuit and blow up.

But I couldn't leave it at that. No. I then took it a step further and decided that extreme cases of overall heinousness merited a title as well. The following recorded conversation then took place:

Me: So what if we saw a guy but he turned out to be completely hideous?
006: No one cares about those, Primp.
Panda: Yeah, that's why you only point and stare at the cute ones anyway, right?
Me: (ignoring 006 and Panda's sage remarks) How 'bout "Shriveled Phoenix"?
Purl: What?! That's disgusting.
Me: Why? Don't you remember that scene in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets when he first sees Dumbledore's bird?
Purl: Just say it out loud. Try it.
Me: (opens mouth)...oh. Right. (I ponder for a moment.) Well then, how about "Dying Fawkes"?
006: But then it just sounds like he's old and senile.

Seriously, Edward is actually 107. But don't read the books. Your time should be better spent and not wasted on Sparklepires. If you really want to validate that, go read Dan Bergstein's Blogging Twilight on Sparknotes. It's a great blog and he's hilarious.

Why was I the one to come up with the more unattractive and possibly repulsive term? Questionable. Let's skip over that part and just say that we eventually decided on Dying Fawkes because the word "shriveled" has some suggestive connotations. So does the word "penetrate". I don't know about you guys, but I find that those two words are almost always followed by awkward pauses, no matter how subtly one tries to slip them into a conversation. Unless I'm playing Hot Seat. Because in Hot Seat, anything goes.

Background Challenge

Hey guys, random challenge for you. Can anyone tell what the background image for this page is/where it's from? If you know, I'll do something special for you, like write a poem or make my next post about whatever you like. First person to leave a comment/email me about it wins. \(^_^)/

Here, have a shoop:

The Dorm Room Matrix

College freshmen have it rough. 

The other day, my roommate left our cozy little double on the third floor to print out her Spanish paper. She reaches the top of the stairs (which is about 15 feet away, not a terrible distance) and realizes she forgot her sunglasses. She comes back to get said sunglasses and goes down two flights before realizing she forgot paper. She runs back up the stairs for paper. This time she gets downstairs to the computer room, loads the printer, and clicks print. End of story, yes? 

No. Some dum-dum left a job running and that uses up two sheets before she figures out what's going on. Back up she goes for more paper. So far I've been giggling and waving and making semi-snarky remarks each time she comes in, but on the last trip up she looks like an angry mermaid. Remember the second task from the movie Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire? I stop giggling.

So she finally prints the paper...and guess what? No really, guess. 

She forgets to staple it. But at this point it doesn't matter anyway, since we had already planned to brave the world outside our room (gasp!) to stock up on desperately needed provisions at a deli near our dorm. Thus our intrepid shield maiden treks back up the stairs to fetch the silly roommate, and then finally, we leave the room. For good.

It's usually not as bad as I made it out to be. That day was an extreme case. It was rainy outside. It was misting. (Did you know that according to certain weather apps, 'misting' is a word?) It was humid. Everyone was sweating through their clothes even though it was only 65 degrees. It was also late September, which when compounded with all the other things I just listed was enough to make everyone into sea cucumbers, their mental capacities reduced to sitting in their rooms and staring out the window with their heads cocked to the side.

But this was not the first time something like that has happened. It all started with little things. Going to class and running back because you forgot your books. Leaving for dinner and shuffling sheepishly back in after realizing you didn't have your keys. Going out on a sunny day - oh, woe! - and leaving your nice, reasonably-priced, rich amber-tinted, subtly pointed cat-eye sunglasses from H&M on your desk. The latter scenario is especially heart-wrenching because I love H&M. H&M is magical.

It took a week or two, but at some point it occurred to me and Purl (my roommate's name in this blog is Purl. That's a knitting term, by the way. Did you know that? I didn't know that. I still don't know what exactly it means. I may Wikipedia it someday when I'm feeling less sluggish) that there was clearly some higher natural law at work here. The basic premise is that when a college student attempts to leave the dorm room, he/she will always be forced to return at least once out of some unforeseen necessity, thus rendering the act of exiting the room successfully on the first take something like trying to determine the exact location of an electron around the nucleus of an atom. It simply doesn't happen. We decided we needed a name for this phenomenon, but all we could think of at first was Murphy's Law. Not quite the same thing, but the feeling's pretty accurate. "F#@%, I forgot my keys...and my wallet...and my books...for the third time today...why does this keep happening to me?"

We floundered around for a few weeks trying to figure out a name. Then we took a six-mile hike at 8:20 AM this morning, and click, everything fell into place.

Remember that scene in the first Matrix movie where Neo sees the black cat run by twice in front of the door? Remember how he says "Deja vu" and then how Morpheus and Trinity completely flip? And how deja vu in the Matrix means that the programmers have made some kind of change? (Poor Mouse. It was the Woman in the Red Dress who did him in. I know it.) It's like that for our dorm room.

Review time, class.

The Dorm Room Matrix, also known as the Dorm Room Matrix Law:

Leaving one's dorm room on the first try will never work. Something will always be forgotten, or some other necessity will be contrived in order to force the occupant to return.

Purl and I are now that much better off now that we can precisely pinpoint the cause of our misery. Of course it doesn't actually change the dorm law, but it's a small consolation. Besides, we got classes off today so we could go climb that mountain. And by extension think of that name. Although as soon as we got on the bus, Purl realized that she forgot her apple in the minifridge. Dorm Room Matrix.