8:30 am – wake up to the geese and beautiful sunshine above Lake Waban
8:32 am – come back from the bathroom and get back under the covers (it’s not that beautiful after 4 years)
9:00 am – hit the snooze button
9:15 am – attempt to wake up with “newborn kitten eyes” (serious squint issues)
9:45 am – accept that I am going to be late to class, but grab a banana anyway
9:52 am – shuffle into my seminar
11-ish – get stoked about topics on African Americans and U.S. Visual culture
12:20 pm – Class is over; still stoked
12:35 pm – Mosey into Tower dining hall. Bump into biffle from the frisbee team, my TZE little, and the president of TZE
12:45 pm – Maxin’ and relaxin’ Sev side with some slop slop sloppy joes. Casually running my hand under my chai. . . . OW!!!!!!!!!!! OW OW OW OW OW OW OW OW!
My little: What happened?
My president: What the hell?
Me: Ow!!!!!
One bloody napkin later, turns out I have a pretty big splinter stuck under the nail on my middle finger. Or as I later described it, half of a Tower dining hall chair.
Of course this is not my only crisis. As a natural blonde, my eyebrows are almost invisible. As I later described it to the frisbee team in an anxious email, “since I don’t have eyebrows, I also do not have tweezers, PLEASE HALP!”
Whiptails were on it, but to no avail. In the midst of my whining, another friend overheard and offered a ride to the health center (I have this syndrome where I can’t walk anywhere farther than 10 min. away: laziness). Thank goodness for Monica (who it was nice to bump into anyway).
Despite it not being drop-in hours, Health Services took my personal emergency fairly quickly (and I read some Rolling Stone). Alas, their tweezers were too thick for the offending chair stuck under my nail! Beyond the throbbing pain that phantomly spread to my other fingers, this experience was the actualization of my biggest fear; looking at my finger seriously freaked me out.
Nonetheless I returned to my room, continued to soak my finger in warm water, may or may not have taken an nap to numb the pain, and awoke with a new determination to extract the splinter. I used my nail clippers.
Five minutes later, I sent out a mass “VICTORY IS MINE” text message. Take that Tower dining hall.
I ruined my manicure, and probably definitely wasted Health Services time, but my friends proved reliable, helpful, caring, and enabling of my laziness syndrome. What more could I ask for?
(Images not included this week; way too disturbing)