Roommate Reflections: Amazing Grace

One day, four or five of The Roommates were out on an excursion when Kandi announced that she had to go to the bank to deposit money before we went out.

It was a Friday, late in the afternoon, on the last day of the month. Which meant, of course, that it was pay-day for 76% of Phoenix and everyone and their brother was in line at the bank.

In true Roommate fashion, instead of waiting in the car or at the Dairy Queen across the way, all of us stood in line with her.

And then she started to sing.

Not just any song, but a song that is highly inappropriate in the line at a bank. Or anywhere.

Ever.

If you're familiar with the song "Discovery Channel," then you know exactly what I'm talking about. If not, then please just take my word for it.

So anyway, Kandi started singing this song, out loud, in a line that crawled along, irritating the rest of the bank patrons and embarrassing The Roommates.

"Kandi, quit singing! Especially that song!" we hissed at her repeatedly.

"I can't help it," she protested. "I have it stuck in my head!"

From behind us, a matronly woman (whose expression had become more and more annoyed the longer Kandi sang), piped up. "Well, you know how to get a song out of your head, don't you?"

Of course, our curiosity was piqued.

"How?" we asked in unison.

"You just sing the words of 'Amazing Grace' to the tune of 'Gilligan's Island'."

The satisfied smirk on her face revealed her evident belief that, not only could we not possibly carry out such a task, but also that she had succeeded in shutting us up.

Sadly for her, that was not the case.

After a brief pause, in which we considered the challenge and glanced at one another in typical Roommately fashion to make sure we were all on the same page, we burst forth in song.

Amazing Grace, to the tune of Gilligan's Island. Flawless on our first run.

The poor woman behind us stood slack-jawed, her eyes filling with horror as she realized that, not only had she failed to shut us up, but she'd taught us an equally irritating diddy with which to drive her insane.

And, to this day, any time any of us has a song stuck in our head that we can't get out, we start immediately in on "Amazing Grace" to the tune of "Gilligan's Island."

Roommate Reflections: Cleaning for a Hat

My senior year, the female R.A.s stole a hat from one of the male R.A.s and used it as an incentive for Room Checks.

Whoever had the cleanest room got to keep the hat for the next week.

It wasn't that The Roommates had any desire to have a smelly old boy-hat, but having the hat was a status symbol, and The Roommates were all about status.

So it was our goal every week to get the hat.

That's a lot easier said than done when you cram eight college girls into a four-person apartment. Especially since many of us are not known for our obsessive-compulsive cleaning habits.

So, we had to come up with a way to both earn the hat and not do any actual work.

And, as we usually did, we succeeded.

Room Check night approached, and Apartment 14 was littered with clothes, dirty dishes, textbooks, homework assignments, lotions and cosmetics, and various other bits of debris typical of the college lifestyle.

I didn't actually live in Apartment 14, but I lived there more often than I did in my own apartment, and since Apartment 14 was The Roommate apartment, I was still invested in the group effort to win the prize.

So, in the dwindling hours approaching curfew, when the R.A.s would make their rounds with write-up slips in hand for those who didn't clean and a hat for the room that cleaned the most, The Roommates scurried about, thrusting junk into every crevice in an effort to make the apartment appear tidy.

We didn't have time to wash all the dishes, but we knew a sink full of dirty dishes meant a write-up, so we stuffed all the dirty dishes in the oven. Food and anything else in the kitchen was stuffed into cupboards and the refrigerator, to be found months later just when its owner had given up hope of ever having it again.

Virtually everything else in the apartment was shoved into closets, until the closets, cartoon-like, threatened to burst open, spewing their contents over the newly-vacuumed floor.

Then, in one last burst of super-human creativity, we strung Christmas lights up around the living room for "added decoration." It may have been because there was not even an inch of space left in a closet in which to stuff them, or it may have been a genuine attempt to make it look more pleasant, but whatever the cause, the effect was nice.

The R.A.s came in, and, seeing the glittering countertops, the vacuumed floors, and no sign of excess junk anywhere, were so overwhelmed they passed us with flying colors.

One of us pointed out the stunning twinkle of the decorative lights draped around the room, and that clinched it. Once again, The Roommates were in posession of The Hat.

Bird's Egg Picnic

I wandered out to the play structure where my children and their cousins frolicked, and sat on the swing.

"Hi guys, what are you doing?"

"We're having a picnic. Want to see?" my son, Bigs, answered.

"Sure."

Inside the playhouse I saw the pits and stems from a pile of cherries they'd eaten. On the windowsill sat several leaves and some Fritos.

Bigs started to hand me a chip, then put it back on the leaf. "It's not done yet, it needs to cook more," he informed me.

"Oh, that looks like a good picnic," I smiled, enjoying his creativity and imagination.

"Yeah, and we had an egg. It was so yummy!"

"An egg? Where did you get an egg?"

"From the bird's nest."

With a sinking feeling I recalled the nest we'd admired earlier, with the innocent bird sitting contentedly therein.
My good sense told me he was just pretending, but I had to make sure.

"Oh, really? Where's the shell?"

"Littles smashed it."

It would be very much in character for my middle child to destroy something. And the more details he added, the more I was inclined to believe this was not product of imagination. Bigs isn't a very good liar.

Still, though, he couldn't be serious.

"And you ate the egg?"

"Yep. We cooked it in the sun and ate it. It was so yummy!"

"Are you telling the truth? Did you really eat it or are you just pretending?"

I looked into my son's eyes, knowing that he was incapable of not letting me know the truth. About that time, he began to realize that maybe what he'd done wasn't a good thing.

He dropped his eyes and tears filled his voice. "I'm not pretending. We cooked it in the sun and ate it."

Now, had we been at home in Phoenix where it's 105 degrees and the sidewalk really does get hot enough to fry an egg, it might not have been so bad. But we were in Portland, where the sky was overcast and the thermometer wavered somewhere in the low 70's.

My mind still hoped that he wasn't serious about taking the egg, or at the very least, that he hadn't really eaten it.

"Show me."

He led me to the windowsill on the shady side of the playhouse and showed me the spot where the wood was still wet from egg soaking into it. The egg itself was nowhere to be seen.

Choking back the desire to vomit, I pondered my options. Bigs is a very literal child. Had someone informed him it was not okay to steal birds' eggs and eat them raw, he never would have done it. But he also, apparently, has no common sense. He eats an egg for breakfast most mornings, and the sun is hot so it must be capable of cooking things. Clearly, the thought of salmonella or other risks never occurred to him.

That being the case, I didn't want to punish him. He didn't know he'd done anything wrong, and I knew him well enough to know that my disappointment would be punishment enough that he'd never do that again.

So I very calmly explained to him that he just killed the poor bird's baby, at which point his cousin piped in with "And ate it!"

Bigs' face fell, and I knew I could be assured of his repentance. That would be enough to ensure that this particular sin would not again be committed. Still, I thought I should make the expectations perfectly clear.

"No more eating birds' eggs. Don't climb up in that tree anymore, and leave the nest alone."

One more crisis averted, and without any lasting side effects that I know of. But he's only 5, and Littles is only 3. I have many more years of boyhood to contend with, and I have no doubts that my blog will have fodder to last several lifetimes.

Roommate Reflections

Five Letters

My senior year the college started a drama group that I joined. The woman who led the group was a professor in one or two classes, one of which Sunflower was in. So when she took an intense dislike to Sunflower, I knew enough about her to believe that her dislike was totally unfounded.

I'm not sure how it started. I think Sunflower disagreed with her about something or contested a grade she was given, but however it started, from then on, the professor went out of her way to be mean to Sunflower.

Each paper Sunflower turned in was marked down viciously, glaring red slashes across the page for petty things that other students were not being marked down for. Conclusions Sunflower came to and even sentence structure were attacked, lowering Sunflower's admirable GPA considerably with each assignment.

Many times after receiving an assignment back, Sunflower would be in tears, not understanding the obscene delight the professor seemed to take in attacking her work. Before each assignment, she would pass her paper around to The Roommates for critique, ensuring that spelling, grammar, flow of thought, and conclusions were all as flawless as she could make them. Still, however, the professor marked her down, for things as petty as word choice and topic.

Finally, Sunflower wrote a letter to the professor, kindly and respectfully contesting her latest grade and asking what she had done to deserve such treatment.

The professor wrote back, snippily and haughtily suggesting that Sunflower was petty, immature, and rude.

Sunflower wrote back, again in a respectful tone, defending herself, and again was attacked by another letter from the professor decrying her behavior, until Sunflower was ready to drop the class altogether in her frustration, despite the damage it would do to her grade.

Now, The Roommates always made up nicknames for people, to describe them to each other while not revealing to Non-Roommates who that person was. For example, one boy who was always surrounded by a gaggle of admiring girls was nicknamed Mr. Mambo (from the song Mambo Number 5, which was popular at the time). One term I used a lot and passed to the rest of the roommates to describe an unpleasant female was Shrew.

So, after the last letter, as we sat in The Apartment sympathizing with Sunflower over her decidedly unfair treatement, I said, "We should come up with a nickname for her."

"Like The Shrew," Sunflower spat, all the venom born of months of abuse seething in her voice.

In my usual glib manner, attempting to make light of a tense situation, I quipped, 'I was thinking Evil Beast Monster From Hades, but The Shrew works, too."

As often happens, my suggestion stuck, and to this day we use EBMFH when we want to describe someone truly terrible.

Where, Oh Where, Has Avily Gone?

Greetings, faithful Blogeteers! I apologize for my lack of blogging the past couple of weeks. I hope that I was not missed too terribly.... but that I was missed at least a little...

Two weeks ago today I drove out to California to visit my friend Joy who was just coming in from her four-month trip to Thailand. GNH had to work, so the kids and I went ourselves. We stayed with her in her parents' RV trailer for six days, spending lots of time playing at the beach, and on the playground of the church where Joy's father ministers.

The one downside was that I had no internet access. One time I checked my email on Joy's parents computer, with an internet connection speed reminiscent of molasses rolling uphill on a cold day. So, naturally, my regular blog posts got laid by the wayside.

When I returned home, I spent a day recovering from my trip, then launched immediately into my summer occupation of watching my friend's kid while she is at work. Then, that same week, my father came into town to visit and see his new grandson, my brother's new baby, so I spent quite a bit of time out and about with him. Also that week, I potty-trained my middle child.

Needless to say, with everything else going on this past week, I have left my blogging in its dejected place by the wayside, from whence I now retrieve it.

I hope you have not given up on me, and will all come back!

Misused Word of the Day

Today's word isn't so much a word as two commonly misused sets of letters.

i.e. and e.g.

i.e., from the Latin id est, means "that is." When you make a statement using "i.e." there should only be one thing to follow, and it should be a synonym, or another name, for whatever preceded it. It indicates that an explanation or paraphrase is about to follow.

“Many workers expect to put in a forty-hour week — i.e., to work eight hours a day.”


e.g., from the Latin exempli gratia, means "for example; for the sake of example; such as." A list of examples may be preceded by e.g.

“She loved exotic fruit, e.g., mangoes, passion fruit, and papayas.”

Many times, these two are used interchangeably. Most often, I see "i.e." used when what the speaker means is "e.g."

And now that you know the difference, I trust that you will use them correctly from now on; i.e. don't mix them up any more.

Roommate Reflections

Dorm Wars

My first year of college, when I lived in the dorm, there was a pretty severe rivalry going on between the girls' dorm and the boys' dorm. Pranks flew like feathers in a pillow fight, escalating with each trick.

It started out innocently enough. We (the girls' dorm in general, although not everyone was involved in every prank) did little things, like Elephant Runs.

The Freshman dorm was a smallish, two-story building. Girls lived on the top floor and boys lived on the bottom. We quickly learned that virtually everything we did could be heard below, so when we wanted to annoy the boys we'd stand in our rooms or in the kitchen and drop marbles or pennies on the hard floors, sending pinging echoes through the boys' abode. Or, we'd all start at one end of the building and Elephant Run down the hallway, our thundering footsteps vibrating the building and annoying the boys.

Their retaliations were equally irritating but harmless. Sometimes they'd call the payphone situated in the hallway in the middle of the night, and then hang up before someone answered. That way, they woke us all up, but didn't have to waste a quarter.

We stuck a dead fish in their vents so their whole dorm stunk for weeks, but they didn't know what the smell was or where it was coming from.

In turn, they dressed up in the outfits from the Scream movies, with the scary masks, and climbed up and knocked on our windows late at night, severely freaking some of the girls out.

We upped the stakes a little bit by removing all the license plates from their cars (we didn't realize at the time that it was illegal...) and gift-wrapping them, leaving them in the Student Activity Center (affectionately referred to as The SAC) for the boys to find. One of our prime antagonists got his truck propped up on blocks and the tires removed and hidden around campus.

The boys crossed the line, however, when they invaded our dorm. One Saturday night when we were all sleeping, they broke in. They got one of those giant (and I do mean GIANT) bags of popcorn and dumped it all up and down our hallway and in our common area. They left messages in shaving cream on our walls and floor, the most prominent being "GOTCHA, SUCKERS!" running down the length of our hallway. In our common area, on top of a three-foot-high mountain of popcorn, they left us a pair of giant, nasty, skid-marked tighty-whities.

Then, as if that weren't enough, shut off our electricity so our alarm clocks didn't go off in the morning (VERY frustrating for a few of the girls who had jobs and church commitments), and they got these giant traffic barricades and wedged them in front of both the front and back doors so we couldn't get out. We had to send someone out the window, scaling down the brick latticework, to go remove the barriers.

So there we were, at home on a Sunday morning, seething from our recent violation, and with the knowledge that the boys' dorm was sitting empty...

No WAY were we gonna let this slide!

After pitching in money, a couple girls went to the store, returning with birdseed, syrup, shaving cream, vinegar, and sardines, among other things.

One of our girls was dating one of their boys, and she managed to finagle his key from him, so when we were all prepared, we snuck into the boys' dorm. We put syrup on door handles and toilet seats, then stuck birdseed to the syrup. We littered the floor with birdseed. We wrote shaving cream messages. We put sardines in the washer and dryer so their clothes would smell. We sprayed vinegar on the walls so the dorm would smell funny. And we returned their tighty-whities.

In the exultation of revenge, some of the girls got a little carried away. The next day, we were hauled into the dean's office. The chewing out we received could have made a drill sergeant jealous. Apparently some of the birdseed had found its way into a CD player and ruined it, and the vinegar had stained the couch in their common room.

We were threatened with suspension and even expulsion. All future dorm wars were strictly forbidden.

Finally, after we explained that it was retaliation for what they had done, and that we didn't mean to damage property and would gladly pay to replace it, we were let off with write-ups and community service.

And we managed to do most of our community service hours scouring and doing improvements on our own dorm, so we pretty much managed to cheat our way out of our entire punishment.

And thus a firm foundation for The Roommates was built.