In between Carnival, V-Day and the down time between rounds one and two of midterms, I'd reckon that most of you have felt the need to let loose at least once.
You may have danced, played pong or streaked across the entire state of Vermont. Come morning, you might not have remembered much about the previous night, or even where you awoke. If you've had a real good night of raging (and assuming you compulsively write in a diary), the morning after might look a little something like this diarized tribute:
8:45:00 -- Wake up. You don't immediately recognize this bed, or even this room. "Whatever," you think, "Carnival...rage. V-Day...rage. V-rage? No." You quickly close your eyes and try to go back to sleep.
8:45:07 -- Holy crap! You think you just touched someone else under the covers! Who the hell is that? You thought you went to bed alone! You close your eyes tight so they don't know you're awake. "Play possum," you think, "it always works."
8:45:13 -- What if this person is the type of person who thinks it's cute to kiss you awake? Or worse, caress you awake? Or worse yet, pour a gallon of cold cottage cheese on you to wake you up? What if they're from, like, West Virginia, and they eat possums? You wonder, "Is this what it's like to be blind?" and maintain the fully-cringed position.
8:45:47 -- Okay, they're not awake. The fight-or-flight response fades, and you decide to go back to sleep. After all, your eyes are already closed. There is no sense in doing this on an exhausted brain. After all, it was (apparently) a late night last night, if you catch your own drift....
8:50:00 -- You swear you felt them move. You felt something move. Did you just move? Did they move? Why didn't you pay better attention when you were reading "The Worst Case Scenario: Sex and Dating?" They had a whole section on this. You thought that was so funny at the time. "God, I'm a moron," you whisper out loud. You shut yourself up and pretend to be sleeping even harder.
8:51:00 -- When you think about it, you realize it doesn't matter if you don't know their name. Will they ask you for their own name? Of course not. You've got it made in the shade. You confidently begin rehearsing and almost whisper "Hey, you! I didn't think you'd be up first after last night..." You nearly say it out loud.
8:52:00 -- What if they want you to blitz, though? Then you have to know their name. You couldn't just ask them for a reply-to, could you? "Hey, what's your reply-to?" Who says that? No one. Crap. You could ask for a last name, I guess....
8:52:30 -- You'd better just get out of here.
9:45:00 -- Oh no, you fell asleep again! You open your eyes at long last and realize the room looks, well, an awful lot like your room. Hm. That's odd. Is this person a stalker? Wait ... no ... it is your room!
9:46:00 -- Wait a minute, where's the other person in your bed? They appear to be, well, gone. Well, that's lucky.
9:46:45 -- Or, it's a trap! You look frantically for clues -- a hair, a forgotten sock, the scent of perfume. Then you find something both menacing and obscure. There is a library book in the bed. Who does something like that? "What was I thinking last night?" you wonder, "and who is Heidegger?"
9:50:00 -- You hear the bathroom door down the hall open. What if they're coming back? Springing from bed, you scramble to a good hiding place in your closet, where conveniently you can clothe yourself. You put a large garbage bag on, just in case they are coming back with that gallon of cottage cheese after all. "Lucky I keep garbage bags in my closet," you think. "Poor man's poncho! Carnival, RAGE!"
10:15:00 -- At this point, you're pretty sure that wasn't them coming back from the bathroom.
But they could still be in there. People sometimes take a long time in the bathroom, particularly if they're preparing some sort of reveille-poultice of cottage cheese. It's time, you think, to figure this bad boy out. "Why did I have so many of those Red Bull-and-whatever-else cocktails last night?" you wonder aloud.
10:16:00 -- Last night is coming back to you. "It's all coming back, it's all coming back to me now," you think, before realizing that you're singing Celine Dion in your head. You fall into a fit of self-loathing.
10:18:00 -- As the Celine Dion song in your head approaches its dramatic climax, you stop singing it in your head and start singing it with your whole body. Who cares if you get caught? You belt out: "There were moments of gooooooold and there were flashes of liiiiiiight! There were night's of endless pleasure, it was more than all your lou-sy looooooooooove!!!"
10:19:00 -- You realize you have committed a great imprudence. But you're no longer tired or hung over, so maybe it was worth it. You return to remembering the night before. As it all becomes clear, you begin to feel dumber and dumber. Last night, around 8:30, you started drinking -- Red Bull and coffee.
It had been three days since you last slept, and as a result your judgment was clouded.
When you saw the Heidegger book in the library, you made your move like it was 2:30 a.m. at a Chi Gam Dance Party. You checked it out, then took it home. Barely a word was spoken before you both stumbled into bed. And then that absolute tease of a book started playing possum! In your caffeinated, sleep-deprived state you tried everything -- singing to it, frottage, even offering it aphrodisiac cottage cheese. It was no use.
Your memory is really fuzzy after that, but that's probably because you fell asleep.
