Nick - Five Things I Did While Quarantined In My Room

So this weekend, because I have mono, I did not go anywhere. I didn't go to parties, I didn't go to PK Barnjam practice, and I certainly didn't go to CU Improv Fest.

But I did do some interesting thing. Here are five of them.

Start a Blur cover band

I figured, hey, I can't go anywhere, so I'll just bring the party to me. So I started a cover band. It was me on drums, I played lead guitar, and I filled in for the vocals most of the time. Unfortunately, our lead guitarist was terrible. We could never find a bassist. The singer never learned the words to any Blur songs. And when our drummer developed an opium addiction, everything just went downhill.

Fantasy Football

I found this by Googling "how do I football"

Yeah, I know, I'm no good with football most of the time, but I figured I might as well learn. So I started a fantasy football team. I'd call this a success. My team scored a lot of touchdowns. Our defense was really good. Our offense kicked the ball a lot of times. My linebackers drew way more lines than any of the other teams in the league.

Learn the language of clocks

I found this by Googling "clocks talk"

You probably hear it all the time. That constant, ever-present ticking. Whether it be the wristwatch of the guy next to you or the clock in the back of the room ticking so faintly that you've tuned it out. Well, I'm here to tell you that it's way more than just a noise they make. Clocks are expressive creatures. And if you're willing to put in the time to listen and understand them, clocks will open up to you. In fact, if there's one thing I realized this weekend, it's that I no longer have any use for human friends.

Reach enlightenment

Little known fact: when you reach enlightenment, your chakras glow.

One day, I was just sitting here thinking, and then I realized the nature of all things. It's pretty zen. I would explain it to you, but you probably wouldn't understand.

Begun my new life as ruler of this room

I found this by Googling "I am their ruler"

After reaching enlightenment, I suddenly felt empathy toward all living creatures. I realized, these poor creatures have no structure to their lives. They live in anarchy. Who better than me to give them government? I dumped out my large canister of oatmeal, and proceeded to name each and every grain. Then I assembled my new subjects, and gathered all the objects on my desk for a conference. After an extensive election process, Nick's Room now has a fully functional democracy. Nick's Running Shoes were elected president, with That Funny Metal Coily Piece On The Back Of The Refrigerator as his vice president. Parliament consists of two parties; the National Democratic Labor Party, run by The Halloween Card My Aunt Theresa Sent Me, and the Progressive Party, headed by a very special piece of oatmeal named Klobb. I'm happy to report that this new system is so far stable and functional.

What did you do over your weekend?

-Nick.

Circle of Power

Is there something wrong with me — is it really that noticeable that I didn't shower today, or yesterday? I don't think so, because I tried really hard to smell me, and I can't at all, so I know it's not bothering you that much.

It begins innocently, with a conversation. I'll politely tell this new acquaintance a joke. A good one, usually. He'll laugh, always, and I'll politely chortle along to acknowledge the humor of the joke. Things are going well at this point. The skies are endless and blue, and social butterfly wings can be seen splitting out of my back like feathers in Black Swan. What could go wrong!, I foolishly ask, and I launch into another joke, certain to forge forever this new friendship in the fires of humor.

Suddenly, from the distance, a friend, Mike, approaches with wild reckless speed. He's heading right for my conversation. My conversation. No, I think to myself. Not this time. Coolly I turn my body 90 degrees in an attempt to box out this social wannabe. At this point, I am willing to make a certain sacrifice to protect my social stability, a sacrifice that involves acknowledging the inexplicable way I've turned my current conversation into what can best be described as a right angle of people. My back to Mike, I smile awkwardly at my dear acquaintance and pray that my realignment has caused a gravitational deflection of Mike's oncoming trajectory.

It's no use. In a brilliant maneuver, Mike swings wide around my defending body and enters the conversation from the opposite side. He makes a joke of his very own. What a stupid joke you moron, but what's this? My acquaintance laughs and turns his attention to him! O, bitter betrayal! Terrified, I jerk my head left and then right, surveying the room. My acquaintance has laughed too loud. A few heads have turned and spotted my threesome. A few bored people saunter over. Now there are enemies coming from all directions. It's all over now, I know. Nevertheless, I'm not giving up yet. I will fight to the god damn death.

With each new person added to the small mob, I try to chip in at the conversation with little witticisms to make my presence known. Everyone totally saw that I was here first, anyway. Again, it's no use. My fruitless desperation slowly gives way to the imminent circle that begins to form and tighten. I start to feel constricted on both sides. My arms are pressed against my sides, and the intense wave of body head shoots my temperature through the ceiling. Voices bounce and reflect back and forth across the walls of the circle, pounding at my small body and beating it backwards, until finally, here I am in my usual position, standing behind the little crack between Mike and Steve. Steve isn't that tall, so I can sort of crane my neck over his shoulder and peer in at the ensuing fun that seems to be going on in a world outside my own. I have fallen. My ego, once stroked, has been reduced to fluttering each time I succeed in eye contact with someone from The Group. I don't quite make out everything they're saying, because the music's kind of loud in here, but I don't really dislike Katy Perry, anyway. Whenever Mike or Steve talk, though, I hear their words easily, and I feel vicariously as if I'm a part of their words, as if in some small way, my presence has some bearing on the wind of influence that blows into them from behind. My acquaintance looks at me from across the way, and I yearn for some kind of acknowledgment, some hint that he knows things were simpler once, more beautiful. There is no spark in his eyes, though, and I can only guess that he's already forgotten my name. I shrink back, hesitantly, and I make one meek and final push toward the circle, but there's no give between Mike and Steve. The Group has everyone it needs. And I am alone. I remember the joke I told just five minutes prior, and I chuckle quietly to myself. Yes, it was a good one. I tell it again in my head. Yes, very good.

Cicadas Part 2: To Dust

By Robert Langellier

Yo this is Part 1

Soon, the genocide begins.

The great predators of the air swoop down and attack, day and night, without cease. In droves, they come. The great predators of the air outmatch us in every ability, for they have lived on the earth for many hundreds of suns, and they have grown massive by it and they have learned great flying skills by it that we will never know, because we are to die, and soon. Their talons are sharp and infinitely large, but it is of no matter because we are swallowed up whole by their beaks in an instant. We never have to suffer from the talons.

Those who are taken by the great predators of the air are the fortunate brothers, at least those which have already mated and prepared for their deaths. They are lucky, for you cannot see anything inside the bellies of the great predators, or even in the bellies of the legged predators of the earth. And the sights of the earth have become grotesque as the suns grow hotter and hotter.

I limp across the pavement and weep and shudder and I stop and continue and weep some more. I stop again. All around me lie the bodies of my brothers, littering the concrete like leaves or sticks, only tinier and weaker and barely more alive. My brethren are everywhere, sick and malnourished and weak and ever aging, and they remind me of me, for I am sick and malnourished and weak and very old. I still don’t have a mate.

There are piles of them everywhere I go. To my left, endless bodies. To my right, endless bodies. And ahead of me and behind me, there are bodies. I come to a crack where there are six bodies all dead lined up and touching, and I have no choice but to crawl over my own brothers to continue. I need a mate. I am dying. I have none yet, and I am dying, and there will soon be no more suns. And my brothers are dead everywhere.

The worst part of it is that many are alive, but only enough to twitch and pretend that they are not about to die. I grow jealous of the thought that, perhaps, the great predators of the air and the earth never have to crawl over their own dead brothers and see them piled up like leaves and sticks everywhere they go.

Up ahead a female is weak and lying on her back. She is trying desperately to right herself, and her legs continually flail into the air and her wings are spastic and scared. I see that one of her wings is broken anyway. I can tell that she has no idea what she could do, even if she did right herself. She would simply be stuck again, and again, and again, until she was not strong enough anymore to right herself and let death add her to the myriads and the piles. Perhaps she is already at this point. She is too weak for me to mate with, anyway, and there are too many others for me to help. I limp past her and ignore her desperate struggles, and it hurts me, but I do not let it affect my limp.

By nineteenth sun the genocide is over. The predators of the air have grown fat and healthy, and they no longer care to hunt us like they once did. Many hundreds of millions of my brothers have died at the hands of these predators, and in my safe tree I mourn for them and call for my female with my luring song.

I do not care to continue anymore. Now, on this nineteenth hot sun, even my body begins to concede. My poor and wretched state on this overwhelming earth has been a pathetic stain, and I know it, and only in brothers’ song do I amount to something significant. And so, two trees from where I shed my skin many suns ago, I sing and I do not eat and I sing until nighttime, and I go to sleep and wake up and sing.

On the twenty-second sun, I see two below me on the pavement, on the pavement littered with bodies. The pavement is a graveyard, and it is awful to look at, and it reminds me of my many fears and my very near future and I want to die. The two meet, and the male clicks with his torso, and he turns to her back and they join. I watch them scuttle and limp back and forth together, and together joined, I watch them manifest my dreams below me, and it hurts me. They seem young to me, but I know that they are not. Only young to me. As I sit in the tree I wonder if his song was more enchanting than mine. It must have been.

Now it is late on the twenty-second sun, and I know that my body has died. I sit, clenched upon my leaf, sticking to it without moving, as I have for the past two suns. I have not found a mate. As I listen, I realize that my brothers’ song has diminished. They are dying, too. We are no longer strong like we used to be, and I among the many am now mateless, sightless, and am very much released.

Natural Selection

Robert Langellier

You don’t need a red wire and a blue wire to experience a real instance of absolute panic. You don’t need a long silence after proposing to your girlfriend of three years. All you need is to have your teacher announce “choose your own partner” time in class.

At this point, starting guns fire in the distance, nervous pit stains appear, and the entire room plays a furiously faux-nonchalant game of musical chairs, except with eye contact and not chairs.

“Finding a partner” is one of the lesser appreciated terrors of the young student. There’s nothing scarier than the possibility of ending up with that weird girl with the greasy hair and the voice of a seal. This bodes dangerously for the normal kid sitting next to her. All eyes in the room will undoubtedly treat his corner of the room like a cluster of lepers. By indiscriminately making a sweeping rejection of an entire region, chances of being paired with Sealia are cut drastically. 

In most cases, everyone will have a preferred target. The Golden Partner. I try utilizing my eyes as a sound combination of mild heat vision and ESP telegraphing to control my target’s focus. If I succeed, he catches my eyes, and I quickly convert them into tractor beams that lock him in until it’s too late for him to escape. I have won, at least for that day.

Never let them see you bleed. Sweat, but never pant. Nobody wants a nervous kid for a partner or a friend. It’s a difficult process to put on an air of being above petty scramblings while a keeping a constant vigilance on a 270-degree region, but in times of real need, unknown potential always realizes itself. Your eyes will adapt to bend light around your temples like bullets in Wanted, and your senses will become attuned to the emotional statuses of both your friends and your enemies. The moment you show fear, the culture will sniff you out immediately. You are then doomed to a less-cool partner, or worse yet. 

Ostracization. If there are 185 penguins in an arctic colony, mathematically, one of them isn’t mating. I failed to mate with anyone in my 8am French class. Over the course of time, every person in class has paired off with an unofficial daily partner. I have been ostracized. Every day is a bleak window of terrifying solitude. My eyelids shift constantly between half-closed half-consciousness and wide-open, petrified fear. Since it is a foreign language class requiring you to speak, French makes room for “partner work” time every single day. And every single day, I try to sink lower into my chair than the day before, in shame.

I have one of three options when this happens. First, I look to see if anybody’s partner has failed to show up. Perhaps I can snatch them up like a Hungry Hungry Hippo marble. When this inevitably fails, I switch to option two: try to fit a third nut into a peanut shell. The way the tiny desks in my classroom are attached to the chairs and packed in, this becomes an exercise in extreme awkwardness, especially when you’ve built a reputation in class of not talking much or interacting with other life forms. I often then concede defeat and slip into option three: sit alone, stare intently at my book, and read the partner exercise to myself semi-audibly. This is true humiliation, coming to its full, awkward, disgusting climax when my French teacher came over a couple weeks ago, knelt down by my desk, and did the exercise with me. Consider myself blacklisted, unless a pity clause is soon invoked in some kind soul. It probably won’t be.

Selection is about speed, strategic angles, communication, and willingness to mouth the word “Sorry” to that one guy while pointing to the kid sitting next to you. Play the game wrong, and you’ll end up as alone as I am. Play the game right, and you might make a lasting friend with a real impact on your life. All it takes is a little luck. One wire makes all the difference.