Memories

One of the bathroom sink faucets was dripping, so I crawled into the cabinets underneath today to try to see what was up.

One day when I came back from a VBS at church, I found the ceiling, floor, bed, books, and everything else in my bedroom were wet. Not only was everything wet, there was also a gaping hole in my ceiling where my dad had broken through to try to replace the leaky pipes. Apparently someone had taken a shower in the upstairs bathroom and the drainage had leaked through the ceiling into my bedroom. He couldn’t find the leak under the bathtub though, so for several years we went without the upstairs shower/bath and I had a section of poorly patched ceiling in my room. Finally, several years later, we opened up the ceiling again to figure out what was really going on. My dad watched as I ran the shower water upstairs and someone else stood on the stairs to relay messages like “start the water!” and “stop the water!” There was no leak when I ran the shower. I came down and we had a conference. I said it might be the overflow drain in the side of the tub that was leaky instead of the regular drain in the bottom. Everyone else said that couldn’t be because the original leak had been caused by a shower, so the bathtub wouldn’t have been full. The rest of the plumbing team humored me though, so I went and filled up the tub. And there it was. The water started pouring out of my bedroom ceiling! As it turns out, we didn’t need to open up my ceiling. The parts for the repair were only about $10 and we were able to fix it from the topside of the tub.

Yesterday, someone I know was trying to mess with me. First she was whispering to another girl and inserting my name loud enough for me to hear. I’ve done this to other people before. It’s funny because people are so quick to notice their own name, so you don’t have to say it very loudly to get their attention. Then after that as I was walking past her, she said “Wait where are you going!?” Apparently I had a look of surprise and horror on my face. Now it sounds ridiculous. She really used a tone like something terrible was going to happen if I kept going though.

I was in Spanish 102 with Doctora Jarvis. Some people don’t really like her. She can be kind of intense, but if you understand her sense of humor, her class is pretty fun. She would have us sing songs like “The Twelve Days of Christmas” en español and then say “The Tabernacle Choir you are not darlings.” Or if she was telling us about a mistake that she found particularly horrifying, she would threaten that students found in violation of her grammatical edict would be “shot in the parking lot at dawn.” Then sometimes, she would ask us a question about English grammar in order to compare it to Spanish grammar. When she found the classroom was filled with blank stares, she would point to herself and say “foreigner,” then point to us, “native speakers, it’s your language, not mine.” Anyway, one time she was trying to compare two different words that both translate to “full” in English I think. So she said to me, “hay siete mujeres en su coche. Una mujer muy, muy bonita dice, ‘¿hay espacio?’ ¿Que dices a ella?” This scenario of six beautiful women in my car is particularly funny because at the time I was driving the notorious Ghetto-mobile, a white ‘95 Dodge Caravan with six passenger seats. My face probably turned red at this point, which I’m sure was Doctora Jarvis’s purpose in choosing this scenario for me. “el coche está lleno.” I said, using our vocabulary word for full. She looked at me with a disappointed expression on her face and went on to the next example. I’m pretty sure I got the phrase correctly, but I think she expected a more charming response. She really like Hugh Jackman… I don’t think Hugh Jackman would turn away a pretty girl just because he ran out of seatbelts.

My dresser has too much stuff on it. I started moving some things around today to clear it off, without really thinking about the row of books which has too many books on it. Something moved in the corner of my eye, and I caught three books just beginning to free fall, as the stone polar bear bookend tumbled into the soft carpet with a thud. In my head, I said to myself “nice reflexes.” Then I went to my computer to start writing a blog post that I knew I would title “memories.”

There’s a scene in Spider-Man where Peter Parker is sitting in a cafeteria. MJ walks past him and conveniently slips on a puddle of some kind of cafeteria goop. In a flash, Peter spins around, catches MJ, her tray and all her food without spilling anything. “Nice reflexes” she says and then walks away.
Once a glass fell off a table and I caught it before it hit the ground. Some girl said to me, “nice reflexes.” It made my day.