Campus Satire Attempt, Continued
Maybe I'll actually be able to get this thing finished by tomorrow. Wouldn't that be a hoot? And by "hoot", I mean "blaaah".
The first part was in the entry before this, in case anyone missed it and cares.
Moira blinked a few times more than strictly necessary to pry the sleep out of her eyes, and reached over to turn off her alarm. At the other end of the room, The Roommate grunted and rolled over, pulling the comforter over her head so as to complete her metamorphosis into an oversized mattress lump.
Moira’s natural sense of paranoia had long led her to suspect that The Roommate found her presence to be one of the highest inconvenience, as if the dorm room they both shared was The Roommate’s natural habitat and Moira herself was some foreign species that had been, introduced causing a great disruption within the delicately balanced environment. There was no definite way to prove this, however, as her and The Roommate were not on speaking terms. This was somewhat of a shame, if only because it left Moira with no way to satisfy her curiosity. The Roommate’s comings and goings were the source of deepest mystery; presumably she took classes and ate meals like everybody else, but there was no way to know this for certain. All that Moira ever knew was when she was there and when she was not, and mostly she was not. Occasionally The Roommate would put in an appearance late at night on a weekend, stumbling over her own feet and smelling like menthol and Budweiser. This was how Moira knew The Roommate had friends on campus, or at least drinking buddies.
After indulging in a quick shower and pulling on some clothes that (she was fairly certain) matched, Moira located with some difficulty her backpack, books and Chemistry worksheet among the clutter that had established itself around her desk. She put on her shoes and somehow got her laces tied successfully, despite the fact that her mind was wandering in protest back towards the dark bedroom, trying to wrap itself back in among the warm blankets and soft pillows. Finally she stood up, made it to the doorway without her legs giving out from under her or her feet turning around to bolt back into bed, crossed the threshold into the hallway, closed the door behind her, and locked it. The last thing she needed was someone getting in and stealing her computer or stereo while she was out, as The Roommate wasn’t exactly a reliable system of crime deterrence.
There was a rumor going around campus that someone had left their door unlocked during the day and a homeless stoner had gotten in and proceeded to eat all their food, drink all their beer and fall asleep curled up in their bed, drooling and covered in filth. No one really believed it, but no one fully wanted to disbelieve it either.
Outside it was a somewhat chilly morning with a sun that glowed white hot off the cobble-stoned paths of the university, making everyone squint. It was the kind of day where the wind would nip at the exposed legs of someone wearing shorts, but the sun would beat down heavily on someone stuck in jeans. It was a typical feature as far as the local climate went; some of the lighter-hearted campus guides liked to joke about how everything at it the university had solid determination in its job, even the weather.
Moira made her way across campus at her usual dawdling speed. She passed one duck pond, crossed two roads, and was handed seven different flyers (immediately disposed without reading) before finally reaching the building where her lecture was. She entered the building and walked into the dim and frigid classroom where the course was located, finding her way to a table near the back of the room and sliding into her seat. Professor Y was calling roll, a tedious and relatively pointless exercise most of the faculty had long disregarded, but Professor Y still insisted on making attendance mandatory. It was rumored that without the points from attendance as a part of their grade, most students could have never hoped to pass his course. Moira pulled out her books from her backpack and laid them before her on the desk, folding her arms and resting her head on top of them. Her mind proceeded to wander for the next few minutes.
“Fife, Moira?” Professor Y pronounced “Fife” as if it was “Feef” and “Moira” as if it was “Mora”, but she didn’t bother looking around to see if there was someone else in the course who could be her near-phonetic twin.
“Here.” She raised one hand and turned her head just enough so that she could see whether or not Professor Y had noticed her. He did, scratching a mark on his archaic attendance sheet, a fossil as fascinatingly outdated as an abacus in an age of calculators and digital watches, and moved onto the next name. Moira closed her eyes again. She wasn’t sure how much later it was when Professor Y finally reached “Zalgraves, Michelle?”, a signal that instinctively caused her to sit back up, flip open her notebook and get out a pen.
For quite some time her thoughts floated along, borne aloft on the stream that was the faraway drone of Professor Y’s voice. Her pencil was in her hand, tap-tap-tapping out a staccato rhythm against the clean lined paper of her blank notebook page. Eyes half-closed, chin rested in a hand that in turn was rested atop an arm whose elbow rested atop a table, no self-sufficient support involved. Her mind wandered. She recalled the dream she had had, already forgotten in the haze in the morning but with sticky one-word remnants still clinging to her psyche, a dreamy train of thought just waiting to slip in through the haze.
Clouds. Flying. Alarms. Sex.
Moira suddenly jerked into full-blown consciousness, her eyes opening wide. Her heart was pounding in her chest, perspiration gathering on the inside of her palms. For a moment she could no longer recall where she was, what she was doing. Her eyes searched desperately around the room. A classroom: tables, chairs, other students, a chalkboard, a professor, notes. She was in a class. Obviously; she was a college student, she was supposed to be in a class. But which class? She didn’t know. What was she learning? She could no longer recall. Why was she here?
Why was she here? The several-thousand-dollar-question, to turn a phrase. Moira Fife didn’t know what she wanted out of life. Didn’t know where she was going. Didn’t even know that one direction looked necessarily any better than the other. Her grades, test scores, and extracurriculars had been of a decent enough sort in high school, so the main question when it had come time for college was not where she could go, but where she should go. Where do you want to go, Moira? Who knew, who cared?
She didn’t know what she wanted out of college, what she wanted to study or what she wanted to do with her degree. So they packed her up and shipped her off to the big state school, stamped “Undeclared Major” on her head in red ink and sent her out to play nice with the other promising young adults in the hopes that some motivation might rub off on her. The general idea was that after some time experimenting with different subjects on the grounds of a hallowed learning institution, the cartoon light bulb would suddenly flip on over her head, the sparks would connect somewhere in her brain, and she would come to realize just exactly what it was that she wanted out of life. That was what the manual had said, that was what the brochure had promised. But now here she was halfway through her second semester, and if anything she felt even more clueless than ever before.
Moira stared down at her textbook, gripping it with both hands in the hopes that it would provide some much needed answers. What did she want out of life? What was her purpose by coming here? What is the secret to the universe? What class was she even in? At least it deigned to answer the last question: the textbook, and the class, was about the history of Great Britain.
From all around her came the sounds of books closing, papers shuffling, chairs scooting, backpacks zipping. The lecture was over. Moira Fife was finished not learning about the War of the Roses for the day.
She trudged back towards her dormitory, somehow managing to not throw herself into the duck pond or in front of a speeding car along the way. The various activists handing out flyers ignored her this time, refusing to make eye contact. There was probably something about the look on her face, the glassy stare in her eye. Maybe they thought she was crazy. Maybe she was, and they knew something she didn’t. It was a distinct possibility; they were certainly smarter than her. At least they knew what they were doing here: mass tree homicide for the higher purpose of annoying relatively innocent college students with brightly colored leaflets.
When she reached her floor in the dormitory, she passed the room where the floor monitor lived. There was one of those obnoxious magnet posters on the door, the kind with all the little faces for different emotions, with a little magnetic frame you stuck over your chosen Emotion du Jour. Shortly before being expelled for prolific use of marijuana, the now infamous boys of Room 323 had pulled a prank with the magnet poster. They had put super-glue on the back of the little frame, and then stuck it permanently over the little face for “horny”.
Inside the room, the bedroom area light was still off; Moira wandered back there so that she could exchange her tennis shoes for slippers. The Roommate muttered groggily, curling up into an even tighter ball.
The first part was in the entry before this, in case anyone missed it and cares.
Moira blinked a few times more than strictly necessary to pry the sleep out of her eyes, and reached over to turn off her alarm. At the other end of the room, The Roommate grunted and rolled over, pulling the comforter over her head so as to complete her metamorphosis into an oversized mattress lump.
Moira’s natural sense of paranoia had long led her to suspect that The Roommate found her presence to be one of the highest inconvenience, as if the dorm room they both shared was The Roommate’s natural habitat and Moira herself was some foreign species that had been, introduced causing a great disruption within the delicately balanced environment. There was no definite way to prove this, however, as her and The Roommate were not on speaking terms. This was somewhat of a shame, if only because it left Moira with no way to satisfy her curiosity. The Roommate’s comings and goings were the source of deepest mystery; presumably she took classes and ate meals like everybody else, but there was no way to know this for certain. All that Moira ever knew was when she was there and when she was not, and mostly she was not. Occasionally The Roommate would put in an appearance late at night on a weekend, stumbling over her own feet and smelling like menthol and Budweiser. This was how Moira knew The Roommate had friends on campus, or at least drinking buddies.
After indulging in a quick shower and pulling on some clothes that (she was fairly certain) matched, Moira located with some difficulty her backpack, books and Chemistry worksheet among the clutter that had established itself around her desk. She put on her shoes and somehow got her laces tied successfully, despite the fact that her mind was wandering in protest back towards the dark bedroom, trying to wrap itself back in among the warm blankets and soft pillows. Finally she stood up, made it to the doorway without her legs giving out from under her or her feet turning around to bolt back into bed, crossed the threshold into the hallway, closed the door behind her, and locked it. The last thing she needed was someone getting in and stealing her computer or stereo while she was out, as The Roommate wasn’t exactly a reliable system of crime deterrence.
There was a rumor going around campus that someone had left their door unlocked during the day and a homeless stoner had gotten in and proceeded to eat all their food, drink all their beer and fall asleep curled up in their bed, drooling and covered in filth. No one really believed it, but no one fully wanted to disbelieve it either.
Outside it was a somewhat chilly morning with a sun that glowed white hot off the cobble-stoned paths of the university, making everyone squint. It was the kind of day where the wind would nip at the exposed legs of someone wearing shorts, but the sun would beat down heavily on someone stuck in jeans. It was a typical feature as far as the local climate went; some of the lighter-hearted campus guides liked to joke about how everything at it the university had solid determination in its job, even the weather.
Moira made her way across campus at her usual dawdling speed. She passed one duck pond, crossed two roads, and was handed seven different flyers (immediately disposed without reading) before finally reaching the building where her lecture was. She entered the building and walked into the dim and frigid classroom where the course was located, finding her way to a table near the back of the room and sliding into her seat. Professor Y was calling roll, a tedious and relatively pointless exercise most of the faculty had long disregarded, but Professor Y still insisted on making attendance mandatory. It was rumored that without the points from attendance as a part of their grade, most students could have never hoped to pass his course. Moira pulled out her books from her backpack and laid them before her on the desk, folding her arms and resting her head on top of them. Her mind proceeded to wander for the next few minutes.
“Fife, Moira?” Professor Y pronounced “Fife” as if it was “Feef” and “Moira” as if it was “Mora”, but she didn’t bother looking around to see if there was someone else in the course who could be her near-phonetic twin.
“Here.” She raised one hand and turned her head just enough so that she could see whether or not Professor Y had noticed her. He did, scratching a mark on his archaic attendance sheet, a fossil as fascinatingly outdated as an abacus in an age of calculators and digital watches, and moved onto the next name. Moira closed her eyes again. She wasn’t sure how much later it was when Professor Y finally reached “Zalgraves, Michelle?”, a signal that instinctively caused her to sit back up, flip open her notebook and get out a pen.
For quite some time her thoughts floated along, borne aloft on the stream that was the faraway drone of Professor Y’s voice. Her pencil was in her hand, tap-tap-tapping out a staccato rhythm against the clean lined paper of her blank notebook page. Eyes half-closed, chin rested in a hand that in turn was rested atop an arm whose elbow rested atop a table, no self-sufficient support involved. Her mind wandered. She recalled the dream she had had, already forgotten in the haze in the morning but with sticky one-word remnants still clinging to her psyche, a dreamy train of thought just waiting to slip in through the haze.
Clouds. Flying. Alarms. Sex.
Moira suddenly jerked into full-blown consciousness, her eyes opening wide. Her heart was pounding in her chest, perspiration gathering on the inside of her palms. For a moment she could no longer recall where she was, what she was doing. Her eyes searched desperately around the room. A classroom: tables, chairs, other students, a chalkboard, a professor, notes. She was in a class. Obviously; she was a college student, she was supposed to be in a class. But which class? She didn’t know. What was she learning? She could no longer recall. Why was she here?
Why was she here? The several-thousand-dollar-question, to turn a phrase. Moira Fife didn’t know what she wanted out of life. Didn’t know where she was going. Didn’t even know that one direction looked necessarily any better than the other. Her grades, test scores, and extracurriculars had been of a decent enough sort in high school, so the main question when it had come time for college was not where she could go, but where she should go. Where do you want to go, Moira? Who knew, who cared?
She didn’t know what she wanted out of college, what she wanted to study or what she wanted to do with her degree. So they packed her up and shipped her off to the big state school, stamped “Undeclared Major” on her head in red ink and sent her out to play nice with the other promising young adults in the hopes that some motivation might rub off on her. The general idea was that after some time experimenting with different subjects on the grounds of a hallowed learning institution, the cartoon light bulb would suddenly flip on over her head, the sparks would connect somewhere in her brain, and she would come to realize just exactly what it was that she wanted out of life. That was what the manual had said, that was what the brochure had promised. But now here she was halfway through her second semester, and if anything she felt even more clueless than ever before.
Moira stared down at her textbook, gripping it with both hands in the hopes that it would provide some much needed answers. What did she want out of life? What was her purpose by coming here? What is the secret to the universe? What class was she even in? At least it deigned to answer the last question: the textbook, and the class, was about the history of Great Britain.
From all around her came the sounds of books closing, papers shuffling, chairs scooting, backpacks zipping. The lecture was over. Moira Fife was finished not learning about the War of the Roses for the day.
She trudged back towards her dormitory, somehow managing to not throw herself into the duck pond or in front of a speeding car along the way. The various activists handing out flyers ignored her this time, refusing to make eye contact. There was probably something about the look on her face, the glassy stare in her eye. Maybe they thought she was crazy. Maybe she was, and they knew something she didn’t. It was a distinct possibility; they were certainly smarter than her. At least they knew what they were doing here: mass tree homicide for the higher purpose of annoying relatively innocent college students with brightly colored leaflets.
When she reached her floor in the dormitory, she passed the room where the floor monitor lived. There was one of those obnoxious magnet posters on the door, the kind with all the little faces for different emotions, with a little magnetic frame you stuck over your chosen Emotion du Jour. Shortly before being expelled for prolific use of marijuana, the now infamous boys of Room 323 had pulled a prank with the magnet poster. They had put super-glue on the back of the little frame, and then stuck it permanently over the little face for “horny”.
Inside the room, the bedroom area light was still off; Moira wandered back there so that she could exchange her tennis shoes for slippers. The Roommate muttered groggily, curling up into an even tighter ball.