Regis Michelena

4/23/02

            Imagine, if you will, a magical place. A happy, joyous land full of happiness and joy, as well as other pleasant redundancies, a world where I have to fend off women with a cattle prod because they want me and my mad accordion skills as if I were a Backstreet Boy, but talented.

            You’ve probably all been there. Think about it: if women want me and my mad accordion skills, I must be dreaming.

            Yes, I like dreaming because of one inherent condition: I’m sleeping. Sleep is great for a few reasons other than making dreaming possible. First off, I can’t be doing Statics homework if I’m sleeping. Granted, I could be sleeping while doing Statics homework, but not the other way around. I’m not sure if it’s like the square-rectangle relationship or if it’s more of a Zen kind of thing.

            Sleeping is also nice because I’m not tired if I do it enough, and it is a time when I can stop thinking about third-world debt and its everyday impact on the twenty-first century man. In a word, sleep is great. Not the best thing that I’ll ever do, but still a very good thing.

            But it would be unthinkable for some people to just let me sleep and escape the implications of third-world debt. A snowball has a better chance in a microwave.

            Slightly before two last Thursday morning, the residents of McIntyre Hall- this includes me- awoke to a really annoying sound. The good news was that it was not Marie Osmond dueting with Axl Rose on a rendition of “I’ve Got You, Babe.” The bad news was, it was a fire alarm. And that meant that I had to get out of bed.

            At first, I didn’t realize that it was indeed a fire alarm. I thought that it was my neighbor’s alarm going off at a gratuitously loud volume. Then I noticed, in my quasi-asleep state, that my neighbors don’t have an alarm that sounds that annoying.

            I got out of my lofted bed, put some pants on (I didn’t want to offend anybody, and I think they have laws against that kind of thing anyway), slipped into my shoes, and grabbed my coat. Then I opened the door, and, with my roommate, ventured into the hallway.

            If the sound of the alarm from inside my room was bad, the noise in the hallway was like ‘NSync in “Attack of the Clones”: really bad.

            We got to the stair well and began the descent from the seventh floor. With everyone else in the building on the stairs at the same time, I couldn’t help but feel like a cow going through a chute to get on a train or something like that.

            So I mooed.

            Oddly enough, it didn’t provoke an increase in profanities from those around me.

            So we get outside and stand in the cold. And in one instant, I had an epiphany: it is really ugly outside at two in the morning.

            At that point, my friends from within the hall found me and we went and sat in the lobby of Orr Hall for a really boring forty-five minutes of no sleep. I took very little consolation in the fact that I wasn’t doing Statics homework.

            Eventually, we got to go back into McIntyre. So I went up the seven flights of stairs back to my room, removed the aforementioned coat, shoes and pants, and got back into bed. I sighed with delight at the prospect of entering the possibility of returning to my cattle prod to fend the women off with.

            Then I heard a noise that was almost funny: one single whoop of the fire alarm.

            “Ha ha,” I thought to myself, as I got very comfortable. “That was almost funny.” And then it got extremely not funny.

            The fire alarm started again with a vengeance. Why the alarm would have vengeance, I cannot say. But it sounded like it did, and when you’re dealing with an alarm, sound is about all you have to go with.

            And so I had to get out of bed again. And put on pants and shoes again. And go down the stairs making mooing noises (with occasional profanity) again, find my friends again, and go over to the Orr Hall lobby again.

            But this time, I brought a book.

            And so I passed what would be an otherwise wasted forty minutes reading. The only problem was that my mind wasn’t fully functional, so I don’t remember most of what I read.

            And then they opened McIntyre for the second time. I went back up the seven flights of stairs again, removed the shoes and pants, and went to bed. I didn’t hear the alarm go off a third time. I stayed up a while thinking if a third alarm in a row would be funny or not. After all, funny things are supposed to come in threes.

            Hey, it was better than thinking about third-world debt.

            If the alarm ever went off again, nobody told me and I didn’t hear it over the screams of the women around me. I didn’t even hear much of a difference when I had to use my cattle prod in self defense.