Saturday: Good samaritans and the moral dilemma of stolen ice cream
Tomorrow will mark one full week since I finished my exams. I have rediscovered the joys of being lazy, but I am yet to achieve my full potential in this area. It is going to take a bit more work to make me even more lazy, but I'm absolutely up for it. I am also finally engaging with the outside world again (that might be the vaguest sentence I will ever write)and I was back in the union on Saturday- Another night out. Nash came down and I caught up with him and Tommy.B in club. Tommy.B incidentally holds the record for the fastest ejection from a club- He was once kicked out of a club in less than sixty seconds from the moment of his entry. "I was a bit rowdy" was his cryptic explanation. Last night he vanished for about thirty minutes while Nash was telling me more about his adventures in South America. Did you know that if you get tear-gassed your boogers remain black for a week? Yep, dont pick your nose if you get hit by tear gas. It will freak you out. Then again, just don't put yourself in a situation where someone thinks that tear gas is a great way to defuse a situation.
But anyway back to Tommy.B- I run into him later on and he looked 'out of it' so to speak. Where have you been? I asked him
He looked a bit sheepish "I fell asleep in the toilets" He said. Turns out he was in one of the unisex bathrooms and just decided to catch fourty winks in the cubicle- not the brightest thing he has ever done by any means. Luckily the door was open because this girl found him in there and woke him up and then she got him a glass of water telling him it would 'sort him out.' I like that phrase- there's something warm and comforting about it and it's so vague. It can sound different as well- my brother once told me about his friend shouting "Fucking sort yourself out, darling!" to a drunk woman he saw staggering out of a club and that just made me really laugh- there's the harsh bit at the start with the F word, then a sort of concession with the 'sort yourself out' bit and then the tenderness of 'darling'. My sisters thought I was some kind of retard for finding something like that funny.
Anyway I've wandered off again- we were still dealing with Tommy.B. The water did the trick and the good samaritan disappeared. Tommy.B then joined the land of the drunk-but-awake. All he had to do was look around the packed dance floor and realize that virtually no one in this place was in a right state of mind. We were all zombies, but zombies who had made a conscious effort not to curl up and go to sleep in a public toilet unlike poor Tommy. I wondered a few times what I was doing in this place, but I was there and it was alright. Still, it's not really my scene.
We got back much later. The others were starving. "Let's get something from the kitchen" Nash suggested. He and James disappeared and got back with a big tub of ice cream- someone else's ice cream. It hadn't yet been touched.
I thought- oh, they're just going to have a few spoons and take it back, but it just kept going round and round. It came to me and I was a bit too tipsy to fully analyze the moral complexities of eating someone else's ice cream. I helped myself. The ice cream went round the room again and again until it was all gone. I stopped philosophising about it completely.
"That was fantastic" Tommy.B said.
I had to agree.
Sometimes I reflect on the order and stability in my life and I'm grateful for it. I thought of this when I met a guy sometime ago who was a friend of a friend- there was something immediately weird about him. Later on I found out that he's been a squatter the entire time he's been at university. he has never paid a single rent bill- he just lives in abandoned houses and when he gets kicked out he just finds another one. He washes up at McDonalds and those guys are almost certainly unaware that they are providing a great way for a uni student to avoid paying a water bill. That's a strange life to lead- cheap as hell, but strange. He is also a very smart guy by all accounts. But when you have the money- he's got his student overdraft after all- but decide to live in an abandoned house with no water or electricity, and knowingly staying on the wrong side of the law for years, that must be a very insecure feeling. Another friend-of-a friend is currently living in a van. He got kicked out by the person he was living with after trashing the house during a bizzare bout of exam stress. Word on the street is that after the exams, he is planning to go on a month-long drug binge. I'm not talking soft drugs like weed but the real heavy stuff- magic mushrooms, ketamine...you name it, he's going for it.
Such is life at an institution of higher learning.
But anyway back to Tommy.B- I run into him later on and he looked 'out of it' so to speak. Where have you been? I asked him
He looked a bit sheepish "I fell asleep in the toilets" He said. Turns out he was in one of the unisex bathrooms and just decided to catch fourty winks in the cubicle- not the brightest thing he has ever done by any means. Luckily the door was open because this girl found him in there and woke him up and then she got him a glass of water telling him it would 'sort him out.' I like that phrase- there's something warm and comforting about it and it's so vague. It can sound different as well- my brother once told me about his friend shouting "Fucking sort yourself out, darling!" to a drunk woman he saw staggering out of a club and that just made me really laugh- there's the harsh bit at the start with the F word, then a sort of concession with the 'sort yourself out' bit and then the tenderness of 'darling'. My sisters thought I was some kind of retard for finding something like that funny.
Anyway I've wandered off again- we were still dealing with Tommy.B. The water did the trick and the good samaritan disappeared. Tommy.B then joined the land of the drunk-but-awake. All he had to do was look around the packed dance floor and realize that virtually no one in this place was in a right state of mind. We were all zombies, but zombies who had made a conscious effort not to curl up and go to sleep in a public toilet unlike poor Tommy. I wondered a few times what I was doing in this place, but I was there and it was alright. Still, it's not really my scene.
We got back much later. The others were starving. "Let's get something from the kitchen" Nash suggested. He and James disappeared and got back with a big tub of ice cream- someone else's ice cream. It hadn't yet been touched.
I thought- oh, they're just going to have a few spoons and take it back, but it just kept going round and round. It came to me and I was a bit too tipsy to fully analyze the moral complexities of eating someone else's ice cream. I helped myself. The ice cream went round the room again and again until it was all gone. I stopped philosophising about it completely.
"That was fantastic" Tommy.B said.
I had to agree.
Sometimes I reflect on the order and stability in my life and I'm grateful for it. I thought of this when I met a guy sometime ago who was a friend of a friend- there was something immediately weird about him. Later on I found out that he's been a squatter the entire time he's been at university. he has never paid a single rent bill- he just lives in abandoned houses and when he gets kicked out he just finds another one. He washes up at McDonalds and those guys are almost certainly unaware that they are providing a great way for a uni student to avoid paying a water bill. That's a strange life to lead- cheap as hell, but strange. He is also a very smart guy by all accounts. But when you have the money- he's got his student overdraft after all- but decide to live in an abandoned house with no water or electricity, and knowingly staying on the wrong side of the law for years, that must be a very insecure feeling. Another friend-of-a friend is currently living in a van. He got kicked out by the person he was living with after trashing the house during a bizzare bout of exam stress. Word on the street is that after the exams, he is planning to go on a month-long drug binge. I'm not talking soft drugs like weed but the real heavy stuff- magic mushrooms, ketamine...you name it, he's going for it.
Such is life at an institution of higher learning.
posted by Minzo at 4:54 PM
3 Comments:
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
Thanks for a great blog.
I couldn't see a profile, so took a while before I realised your'e Bri'ish. Anyway, BB and FA Cup means I'm sure you are. But now found the profile.
PLAIN CHOCOLATE HOB NOBS are the best.
Will read on...
Mohammed UK
there's an expression we use here for people who love free things and bumming through at some one else's expense, of course inspired by our politicians, "that's so ugandan!"
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