As the year progresses, the color-coded schedule wielding freshmen are increasingly replaced by a more cocky variety: the freshman who has spent 48 continuous hours in the Ryley Room and who has, much to your disgust, more Facebook friends than you. But fear not, upperclassmen; despite these swaggering, Rockwell-party-throwing, lower-right-frequenting freshmen, there is still at least one completely lost new student whose easily avoided blunders can be a constant source of amusement and ego boosts. That newbie is me. Last Thursday, for instance, I woke up an hour early. Instead of using this extra time productively, I had a stupid idea. History has turned on ideas like these (“Plague victims? Dump them in the drinking water!” “What revolution? The French peasantry love me!” “That Bush fellow sounds intelligent!”), and mine, while not so disastrous as cigarette-flavored jellybeans, was no exception. I decided to curl my hair. Deceptively simple-sounding. After a few mishaps and probably burning off a few fingerprints (which could turn out to be lucky…what the IRS doesn’t know can’t hurt them) ,I get the curling iron set on “4” and start wrapping my hair around it. Did you know that normal people apparently add two zeros onto every number they see? Hamburger? $400. Nicole Richie? 400 pounds. Curling iron? 400 freakin’ degrees, the exact temperature at which hair acquires that unique burning smell. As my roommate so aptly put it when she woke up, “What is that smell? Did someone eat rotten eggs, fart, and then die and decompose in our room?” I sprinted to the shower, where I proceeded to use an entire bottle of someone else’s minty-fresh shampoo. The result? Minty-fresh dead people scent. Getting really desperate, I used several tons of vanilla-cupcake-scented perfume in my hair. No joking—you know those middle school boys who drench themselves with so much AXE that eyes water, women faint, and dogs die within a hundred meters? I was wearing more. Tentatively, I sniffed. A one-of-a-kind mix of vanilla cupcakes and decaying corpses. I arrived very late and very miserable. My teacher greeted me, friendly as always, with, “Nice of you to arrive, Tiffany. Take your time getting here. Slow down, in fact. Actually, why don’t you come to a complete stop?!” then proceeded to comment on the “oddly appealing, yet roadkill-like smell.” After class, I realized I didn’t have my math book because I left it in Kemper last week. I was planning on doing my math homework during conference (a whole week’s worth, in fact), so I went to the AV Room. Despite my repeated questions, they insisted they definitely did not have my math book. Just as I was leaving, they asked me if I was Tiffany Li. “I am.” “Oh, we have your chemistry book!” When did I lose my chemistry book?! In any case, I gratefully took it and returned to my dorm to pop my clothes into the wash and leave. Again, an easy, straight-forward, practically impossible task to get wrong. But my name is Tiffany, why would I be a practical person? By the time I got back from class, I found perfectly clean green clothes. Many, many, formerly-not-green green clothes. So I learned you’re supposed to separate colors from whites; now that I no longer have anything white, I guess it’s not an issue. I have instead, among other things, a green bra. Sort of like an Irish-meets-tasteless look. My jeans, on the other hand, looked a little like someone puked on them, which I think came from the kid sitting behind me in math class, not from the other clothes. The moral of my story? Sometimes no means yes, drugs are cool, and stay in school, kids. Don’t get involved with sexually repressed congressmen or a man named Jose offering you a great deal on illegal Chihuahuas. Instead, invest in Lucky Charms and curling irons. Meanwhile, I will go for the messy, thrown together chic.
