Why I Barely Graduated

As most people who read this have no doubt surmised, I was a weird kid. How weird? Well let’s put it this way: basically for school essays I would rattle off a page or so of material that would in no way be out of place here amidst the vainglorious pipe dreams, tales of sexual trauma, and random penis jokes. Don’t believe me? Below is an actual essay I handed in for a college course in “Emerging Infectious Diseases.”

I remember when my living quarters were not as pleasant. It was back, way back in the dark days of 2001 when it was still cool to say President Bush was Texas’ most idiotic export since inbreeding. Spandex was in, money was cool, and our technology had just reached new heights with the invention of Velcro. Wait, that was George W’s dad and the 80’s. Anyway, the point was that it was a dark time. Not as dark as the “Me Decade” perhaps, but dark none-the-less.

Now while I thought I was moving into a school dorm in the year 2001, I was actually moving into Central Europe in the year 1348. For the first month there was no heat in my suite. Fuses blew regularly. The water was, well, Western New York water. I don’t care what you say; I can taste the lead.

So there I was, wrapped in bear skins, battling cold and rats in the semi-gloom when my roommate stumbled home. At first I attributed his incessant nausea and moans of pain to alcohol. When it continued for three agonizing days, I decided that if it was alcohol I needed to get my hands on it and if it wasn’t, I should start bathing in peroxide. Regretfully, neither heavy drinking nor peroxide could ward off the horde of bacteria (though the latter did manage to dye all my body hair white). The merciless microbial foes rolled over my defenses like I was WWII France.

My entire suite went down. I was unable to move from bed for three days, except for the trips to the bathroom to be sick. My temperature rose to a comfortable 198, which was good because I gave enough heat to finally keep the room warm. And hey, what with the delirious hallucinations, I hardly noticed the dark, the cold, the smell, or the sounds of six other people being violently ill. I fully expected to see a line of penitent monks march down the hall of our suite, whipping themselves.

One of my suite mates, a braver man than I, traveled out to the health center for help. They asked him repeatedly if he was sexually active. When he answered that he could hardly keep down solid foods, let alone carry on a meaningful relationship with a member of the opposite sex, they seemed disappointed. They sent him home with Claritin and told him to come back when he got some action.

I had no remedies and I wasn’t about to try to make it to the health center to be asked about my personal life. So I did what I usually do when I’m sick: roll myself into a ball, drink hot tea, and prepare my will. Fortunately, on day three my white blood cells landed on the beach, circled, and defeated the enemy. Three weeks later the front desk finally heeded our cries of pain and turned the heat back on. After that, the dorm was almost habitable. Almost. It was, after all, still Western New York.

To this day I have no idea what this vicious ailment was. My guess would be some airborne form of syphilis chemically bonded with a strain of Ebola with a dash of Mad Cow Disease for good measure. Sure, I walked away with no harm, but my suite mates weren’t so lucky. Approximately one in every three was killed. And by “killed” I mean recovered fully. But you know what I mean. To this day I can’t walk by a dormitory without in involuntary twinge, and the feeling that I am very, very lucky to be…ALIVE.