Haunted House

     Last May, my friends and I used to frequent our Friday evenings in our friend Nick's back yard with his bon fire pit, roasting marshmallows, flirting with the cute foreign exchange students, telling stories and being teenagers. It seemed like every time we all got together for a bon fire, we always ended up discussing a haunted house that was about five miles away from Nick's house and we would debate whether or not we should go explore it or not. After many Fridays of chickening out, we finally gathered up enough courage to go take a look.

     I was one of only a few of the group who had not already been to the supposedly haunted house yet, but those who had were absolutely terrified of it. My best friend Nicole said that you can see things moving around in the windows and hear weird noises coming from the building. The others backed her up. I, being absolutely intrigued by ghosts, was PUMPED (I'm probably the girl that either would a) be killed in a horror movie for going to investigate a noise or b) be the fucking boss of kicking ghost ass).

     We went into Nick's garage and dug around for some ghost hunting gear and found some flashlights and... well just a bunch of flashlights. Oh, and Sandy's (the hungarian exchange student) camera. I guess I couldn't expect to be up to par with TAPS from Ghost Hunters on SciFi (or however the hell they spell it now... losers), but I felt we were doing pretty well.
     After gathering our ghost hunting materials and bundling up in sweatshirts because spring nights in Montana are pretty frickin' cold, we piled into two cars and started driving to the house. Along the way I kept asking if houses were the house we were looking for, but Nick assured me that this house was the scariest damn house I will have ever seen in my life. I was skeptical... until I saw the house.

My soul peed its pants.
     We got out of the cars, but about a third of the group chickened out on the spot. We still had a good six people though to go exploring. I was ready. I wanted to see some ghosts. I wanted to see if this was just an old, creepy house, or if it was really and truly haunted.
     Surrounding the house were tall trees that looked like they hadn't had leaves on them in almost half a century. The grass was up to my belly button, crickets were chirping, and as it turned out only about half of the flash lights we brought worked. We decided to all hold hands as we walked towards the house because only two of us weren't really "afraid" of walking towards the house of death and doom.

     We had to walk around to the back side of the house because the front was not accessible due to extreme rotting of the front steps and such. I had to admit, the place was even creepier up close. It's not a place I would choose to hang out at for my birthday or a bar mitzvah. While we walked around the side of the rather large house, we noticed that all of the windows were broken out. When you shine the flashlight in the windows, the house seemed alive... it was not natural.
     People were starting to feel on edge and as we approached the back there was a large amount of red paint smeared across the wall that in all honesty resembled blood. My friend Cody and I certainly did not let the opportunity to make our friends more scared go by.

     While we were standing in the grass gathering up the courage to go into the house, something horrifying happened...

Rapture Vs. Birthday

     As many of you are aware, this past Saturday was supposed to mark the beginning of the rapture. This past Saturday was also my nineteenth birthday... so that rocked. I actually hadn't begun hearing about the rapture madness until two or three days before when I was watching Chelsea Lately and she began discussing the subject. According to Harold Camping, the man who made the prediction, only 3% of the world's population would have been taken to heaven on my birthday and the rest of the world's population would spend five months suffering through plague and earthquakes and terror and eventually go to hell. I have always been extremely skeptical about these "end of the world" theories, but there's always that little voice in the back of my head that says, "what would happen if shit really went down?" So these are my interpretations of my birthday vs. The Rapture.

Nothing Actually Happens And Life Goes On As Expected (Most Likely)

5:59...

6:00...

6:01...

Rapture Happens and I Convince Jesus To Take Me To Heaven

Rapture happens, I attempt to persuade Jesus into postponing, but Kanye West Interrupts me. 

     

The Cough Syrup

     Sometime this March I came down with a terrible case of Sinusitis and Laryngitis at the same time... life rocked. Even though I was slowly dying from my ailments, I was determined to go to my classes. I called my doctor and asked if I could come in and get something to help me make it through the day.

     I drove to her office an hour before my first class started, and she took a look at me and prescribed some super-make-you-feel-better-immediately cough syrup that would take care of most of my symptoms. However, she also told me that due to my smaller stature and the fact that I had not been eating properly while being sick, the cough syrup might cause some interesting side-effects. I wasn't worried though. I had never really experienced bad reactions to medicine before and I just wanted to go to class.

     I went to the pharmacy, got the super-duper cough syrup, took the prescribed amount, and drove to the University.

     I was slightly early for my first class and decided to go grab a coffee. While I was standing in line, I began to feel kind of light-headed,

 but I just figured it would go away once I drank some coffee.
     I am usually a pro at ordering coffee, however when I approached the counter on this particular day, my mouth could not form proper words.

Somehow I got the coffee I wanted and began wandering around the open, grassy area of my college. I was lost in a circle and literally could not find my building (it is visible from EVERY point of the open area).

 I ended up e-mailing my professor from my cell phone telling him I was having a bad reaction to some cough syrup and would not make it to class. I don't think everything was spelled correctly because he never looked at me the same after that day.
     While I was wandering and drinking a coffee I tried thinking what I needed to do. I knew that I had sociology and ballet and they were in the general same direction...

 so I started walking.

     I don't exactly know how, but I ended up in the business building where my next class was. I looked at my cell phone and saw that I still had an hour before the class started.

 I slowly worked my way to the lower level of the building

taking one stair at a time

 until finally I made it to the bottom.

Most buildings have some kind of lounge area, so I began searching for a big room with couches and people sleeping since that's what the lounge in my building looked like. I came across a room with some awkward space age looking chairs with people sitting with their computers.

I was not convinced that this was a real lounge because it did not look like the one in my building. I decided to ask a young man in a suit if this was the lounge, but I still was not forming coherent words and said something along the lines of, "Eees lonj?"

    After figuring out that this was indeed a lounge, (just not as superior as the one in my building with lazy boy couches and coffee tables) I collapsed in a chair... or five chairs and began staring off into space.

     I felt like I had been lying on the chairs for about an hour but it had really only been five minutes. I decided to change things up a bit and sit up while staring because lying down made me feel like I was floating, and that made me feel like my life wasn't going in a solid direction... I don't know, I was tripping on cough syrup.
     Something about sitting up caused this little voice in the back of my head to begin talking to me. The voice told me that if I studied my spanish at that exact moment in time, I would inevitably be the best spanish speaker in the world.

     I whipped out my text book and began trying to understand adverbial clauses and when to use the subjunctive or the imperative. I believe it is this study session that inevitably lead to my future struggles with this subject in spanish grammar to this day.
     It was eventually fifteen minutes before my class started and I worked my way upstairs to prepare myself to take notes for an hour in Sociology. However, when I ran into the guy I sat next to, he informed me it was a test day.
     After staring at him for quite some time and then explaining the cough syrup situation, he suggested asking my professor if I could take the test at another time. I began searching for my professor.

     When I found her I began explaining in great detail and with large words that my mouth was not at the capacity to pronounce at that moment in time.

She told me that if I wanted to take the test on another day I would need a doctor's note and I just didn't want to go back to the doctor again because the last time I did she made me drunk. So I decided to take the test.

     I got a 96%.