Author: Daniel

I have a lot of DRAFTS that are waiting to be finished. I have been reading instead of writing (some good books too). I thought I would let the world know. Bwahahaha. 🙂

It is in the quiet, subtle moments:

• When she smiles and mouths “thank you” so quickly that no else notices but you.
• When all he can barely keep a straight face because he is so excited.
• When he can’t say anything at all, because words escape him.
• When she laughs harder than she’s laughed all month.
• When she stands on a chair because your presence liberates her.
• When he cries on your shoulder and tells you his woes.
• When you cry on his shoulder and tell him your woes.
• When you both stay up so late that you become delirious, but you still don’t want to go to bed.
• When she already knows you are having a bad day, but asks anyway.

It is in these, the quiet, subtle moments, that one can learn the true meaning of friendship and love.

The evidence is plain and clear. In fact, it happens so often that we have a place on our counter to indicate it. The dreaded FIRE DRILL. No, this isn’t some process imposed upon us by some overlording and highly paranoid apartment manager. This is a process imposed by neccesity, fostered by roommates cooking. The Fire Drill goes something like this:

1. Roommate decides to cook (stove or over, doesn’t matteer).
2. The food items are selected, prepared and then the cooking begins.
3. Distraction insues and smoke begins to build. The nature of the distraction doesn’t matter, just that it happens.
4. Once enough smoke has built up, the Living Room smoke detector goes off. The detector is designed to get you out of the smoky building so you don’t die. To make this happen more efficiently, the one alarm that can actually detect smoke, the Living Room, convinces all the other alarms (I think they use telepathy for this) to raise the alarm. Within seconds the whole apartment is blarring with the warning of impending doom.
5. The nearest, and most able roommate (not all are equally capable of this feat) swiftly climbs a near by bar stool and skillfully dismounts and disconnects the smoke detector (it’s all in the wrist).
6. The smoke detector is then placed on the kitchen counter as an indicator that the fire alarm still works.

Toward the end of last semester, I started receiving what I deemed an exorbitant number of emails (six in two months) from the university Book Store that all said the same thing: come buy your books from us. Their level of desperation has nearly solidified my resolve to avoid buying books from the Book Store as much as possible (instead, I rent the books and that ends up being far less expensive than buying them and selling them back and it’s easier on my cash flow), but that isn’t what this is all about.

Since I had six opportunities to view their emails, that general pattern started to sink in and instead of simply reading the distastefully colored email, I began to see something entirely different. I was finally bored enough in my science class to illustrate the email the way I saw it. I would suggest starting with the Original Version and then progressing to the Full Version. The Full Annotated Version is a bit of overkill, but I was bored, and overkill is what happens in Alien Invasions anyway.

The Documents:

Original

Full

Annotated

Daniel: Oh, Wisdom.

Wisdom: Yes?

Daniel: Is perfection too much to ask?

Wisdom: In this life, yes. But we strive for it. In the next life, not so much. It is more expected there.

Daniel: Why do so few people seem to even be trying?

Wisdom: That’s one of the hardest things to deal with in this life: watching people succumb to less than their potential.

Daniel: This must be what the prophets feels like, but on a much grander scale, when he hears about all our “time wasters” that are really “perfection distracters”. And thus we, as a race, fall so far short of what we could be–all so we can laugh at a joke a little too crude, sigh at a love story a little too immoral, be entertained by media a little too lowly and in general embrace a world a little too inferior. I suppose it is mostly a function of laziness. This makes maxim about to mastering time before we can master timelessness. It takes a lot of work to fill our corporeal life with worthwhile things.

Wisdom: Yes, indeed. Now it’s time for bed.

Daniel: Okay, thanks for talking. Good night.

Wisdom: Night.

Daniel: Yes it is. (laughs to himself, then out loud)