Monday, November 15, 2004
In the doghouse
Well, I emailed my Celtic Civilizations professor about this whole mess and although he sounds incredibly pissed off about it, I've been allowed one week to write a ginormous essay and it's up to me to study enough not to fail my exam at the end of the term. With this due at the end of this week and a twice-as-ginormous essay for Viking history due at the end of next week, resolving this issue has not been the huge relief I was hoping it might be.
On Saturday night, we celebrated Rosie's 23rd birthday by getting drunk and going clubbing. This was obviously a massive deviation from the other weekends I've spent here. Actually, it was special because Rosie's older brother and her friends from Aberdeen College came up to the flat, which never happens. A space was cleared in the sitting room and everyone attempted to have a mini-dance party. While they was doing that, I crept over to the snack table and gorged myself on sausage rolls and enough french bread to make me fluent in the language. I feel it's best to be yourself when meeting new people.
I didn't get all that drunk that night either, because we used vouchers to pay for our pitchers of vodka red bull at the bar and I'm pretty sure they got even with us by putting, like, no vodka in. My method of dealing with this was to just drink more of it. When I went to bed that night, I laid awake until 6:30 in the morning totally wired with caffeine and feeling like my eyeballs were going to vibrate out of my head.
Yesterday, I spent most of the day hanging out with my friend Louis at his place. We were watching The O.C. when he started eating some kind of crackery cookie-looking things out of a plastic cup. "Try some, they're delicious!" He shook them in front of me. I took one and turned it over in my hand. It was black, had an odd shape, and seemed a little hard, but I've eaten stale food before. What the hell? I took a bite.
Very quickly, I realized that something was wrong. After chewing for a (very) brief moment, I looked sharply at Louis and demanded loudly, "What the hell is this?" Between great heaves of suppressed laughter, he managed to squeak, "It's a dog biscuit!"
"IT'S WHAT?"
I had heard him correctly. I should have known better: have you noticed that snacks for humans, are never, ever, ever the color black? Now I understand this is because SOMETIMES DOG BISCUITS ARE BLACK AND YOU WOULDN'T WANT A PERSON TO ACCIDENTALLY EAT A DOG BISCUIT, WOULD YOU? Unless your name is Louis. Oh my god. The taste. The texture. It was against nature. I sprinted to the bathroom to wash it out of my mouth. It took a long time.
When I returned, I had more questions for Louis. For example, "WHY DID YOU DO THAT? WHAT'S WRONG WITH YOU? WHY DID YOU DO THAT?" The truth, while unsettling, was at least better than if this was simply a practical joke designed to humiliate me: Louis just genuinely likes to eat dog biscuits. It's a bit questionable that he didn't tell me what they were before offering me one, but maybe he just wanted to perform a blind taste test to see if I would like them too. It's like when I hide assorted bits of meat in Marianne's food to see if maybe she's secretly not vegetarian. Just kidding...or am I?
Maybe this is what the student handbook was talking about when it said, "This is an opportunity to eat things you have never eaten and see places you've never seen!" I just never expected those things to be dog biscuits and a girl's fist in my face.
On Saturday night, we celebrated Rosie's 23rd birthday by getting drunk and going clubbing. This was obviously a massive deviation from the other weekends I've spent here. Actually, it was special because Rosie's older brother and her friends from Aberdeen College came up to the flat, which never happens. A space was cleared in the sitting room and everyone attempted to have a mini-dance party. While they was doing that, I crept over to the snack table and gorged myself on sausage rolls and enough french bread to make me fluent in the language. I feel it's best to be yourself when meeting new people.
I didn't get all that drunk that night either, because we used vouchers to pay for our pitchers of vodka red bull at the bar and I'm pretty sure they got even with us by putting, like, no vodka in. My method of dealing with this was to just drink more of it. When I went to bed that night, I laid awake until 6:30 in the morning totally wired with caffeine and feeling like my eyeballs were going to vibrate out of my head.
Yesterday, I spent most of the day hanging out with my friend Louis at his place. We were watching The O.C. when he started eating some kind of crackery cookie-looking things out of a plastic cup. "Try some, they're delicious!" He shook them in front of me. I took one and turned it over in my hand. It was black, had an odd shape, and seemed a little hard, but I've eaten stale food before. What the hell? I took a bite.
Very quickly, I realized that something was wrong. After chewing for a (very) brief moment, I looked sharply at Louis and demanded loudly, "What the hell is this?" Between great heaves of suppressed laughter, he managed to squeak, "It's a dog biscuit!"
"IT'S WHAT?"
I had heard him correctly. I should have known better: have you noticed that snacks for humans, are never, ever, ever the color black? Now I understand this is because SOMETIMES DOG BISCUITS ARE BLACK AND YOU WOULDN'T WANT A PERSON TO ACCIDENTALLY EAT A DOG BISCUIT, WOULD YOU? Unless your name is Louis. Oh my god. The taste. The texture. It was against nature. I sprinted to the bathroom to wash it out of my mouth. It took a long time.
When I returned, I had more questions for Louis. For example, "WHY DID YOU DO THAT? WHAT'S WRONG WITH YOU? WHY DID YOU DO THAT?" The truth, while unsettling, was at least better than if this was simply a practical joke designed to humiliate me: Louis just genuinely likes to eat dog biscuits. It's a bit questionable that he didn't tell me what they were before offering me one, but maybe he just wanted to perform a blind taste test to see if I would like them too. It's like when I hide assorted bits of meat in Marianne's food to see if maybe she's secretly not vegetarian. Just kidding...or am I?
Maybe this is what the student handbook was talking about when it said, "This is an opportunity to eat things you have never eaten and see places you've never seen!" I just never expected those things to be dog biscuits and a girl's fist in my face.
