What you give is what you get
These days I'm worried about your debts
Who carries evil out, evil will come
Who will defend you when I'm gone?
He says, who will defend you when I'm gone?
Here he comes
Here he comes
Be still the wooden heart
That wouldn't ever part
Waiting on a spark
That hasn't happened yet...
(-The Wallflowers)
I neglected to mention in my other post that one of the more social events of this semester happened on Thursday night/Friday morning at about 12:30 PM. I had just turned in--I try to get to bed at a decent hour before my 8 AM class, M/W/F--and was drifting off to sleep when the fire alarms went off. Now, some of you may have heard about Preston Hall burning down last spring. For those of you that didn't, there was an electrical fire in the attic of a dorm in the Randolph Complex here on campus. Naturally it made the powers that be very nervous about something similar happening elsewhere--Preston is one of the newer dorms on campus, so if they had a fire it could happen anywhere. So--this is all speculation on my part--they installed fire alarms (at least here in Bryan Hall, where I live) that go off when someone on the first floor thinks about a cigarette.
So the claxons went off, strident as usual. I had time to put on my bathrobe and shoes--after all, there's never a fire in any of these cases. One time, someone burned a pizza. Usually it's a smoke detector that went haywire over a smoldering bag of popcorn. At any rate, the day there really is a fire will be an interesting one because I doubt anyone in this whole gorram complex takes the drills seriously by now. (We have had about three times the amount of fire drills in the past two semesters than I have had in the past three years on campus.) So, we stood around while the cops, fire trucks, ambulances, tanks, etc. rolled up and proceeded to sit there with lights flashing and doing what appeared to be diddly-squat. One poor soul had decided he had time to put on either his coat or his shoes. He had opted for his coat, and was now doing a sort of frenzied jig in bare feet on the ice-cold asphalt while cursing the firemen, the cops, the smoke detectors, and anything else he happened to think of along the way.
Eventually, somebody made an announcement that there had been a fire extinguisher set off in Dawson Hall (does that really set off a fire alarm? And if so, how?) and that the cops were dusting for fingerprints. Meanwhile, nobody could go back into any of the five dorms while the police were doing whatever--probably taking glossy photos with circles and arrows and paragraphs on the back explaining what each one was to be used as evidence against the Unknown Fire Extinguisher Vandal. After a few more minutes of this song-and-dance, they let us back in. I expressed my supreme hope to a neighbor of mine that someday I'll be able to use one of these midnight fire drills to get a date. I'm still working on a pickup line.
Really, though, what does it say about me--about us, the residents of Bryan--that our most exciting hall activity involve standing outside in below-freezing weather for half an hour dressed in our nightclothes?
These days I'm worried about your debts
Who carries evil out, evil will come
Who will defend you when I'm gone?
He says, who will defend you when I'm gone?
Here he comes
Here he comes
Be still the wooden heart
That wouldn't ever part
Waiting on a spark
That hasn't happened yet...
(-The Wallflowers)
I neglected to mention in my other post that one of the more social events of this semester happened on Thursday night/Friday morning at about 12:30 PM. I had just turned in--I try to get to bed at a decent hour before my 8 AM class, M/W/F--and was drifting off to sleep when the fire alarms went off. Now, some of you may have heard about Preston Hall burning down last spring. For those of you that didn't, there was an electrical fire in the attic of a dorm in the Randolph Complex here on campus. Naturally it made the powers that be very nervous about something similar happening elsewhere--Preston is one of the newer dorms on campus, so if they had a fire it could happen anywhere. So--this is all speculation on my part--they installed fire alarms (at least here in Bryan Hall, where I live) that go off when someone on the first floor thinks about a cigarette.
So the claxons went off, strident as usual. I had time to put on my bathrobe and shoes--after all, there's never a fire in any of these cases. One time, someone burned a pizza. Usually it's a smoke detector that went haywire over a smoldering bag of popcorn. At any rate, the day there really is a fire will be an interesting one because I doubt anyone in this whole gorram complex takes the drills seriously by now. (We have had about three times the amount of fire drills in the past two semesters than I have had in the past three years on campus.) So, we stood around while the cops, fire trucks, ambulances, tanks, etc. rolled up and proceeded to sit there with lights flashing and doing what appeared to be diddly-squat. One poor soul had decided he had time to put on either his coat or his shoes. He had opted for his coat, and was now doing a sort of frenzied jig in bare feet on the ice-cold asphalt while cursing the firemen, the cops, the smoke detectors, and anything else he happened to think of along the way.
Eventually, somebody made an announcement that there had been a fire extinguisher set off in Dawson Hall (does that really set off a fire alarm? And if so, how?) and that the cops were dusting for fingerprints. Meanwhile, nobody could go back into any of the five dorms while the police were doing whatever--probably taking glossy photos with circles and arrows and paragraphs on the back explaining what each one was to be used as evidence against the Unknown Fire Extinguisher Vandal. After a few more minutes of this song-and-dance, they let us back in. I expressed my supreme hope to a neighbor of mine that someday I'll be able to use one of these midnight fire drills to get a date. I'm still working on a pickup line.
Really, though, what does it say about me--about us, the residents of Bryan--that our most exciting hall activity involve standing outside in below-freezing weather for half an hour dressed in our nightclothes?
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