Every morning this week I have woken up to find myself in bed with at least three sticks of deodorant. I didn’t even know that I owned that much deodorant. I can never find it when I actually need the stuff which is both a burden on me and anyone who happens to walk by me that day. The thing is, I travel back and forth between school (where I live with my parents) and my actual apartment so much that every day I wake up having no clue where I am for the first 15 seconds of consciousness.
You know when your friends decide at 4am that it is a good idea to start a game of Risk? You comply because you have very few friends, and you don’t want to lose these last few nerdy friends even though they participate in outlandish games that involve too much thinking. You look down at the board, look back up, and all of a sudden it is four days later and you’re not sure how you’ve managed to go this long with peeing. You also wonder, more importantly, how did you go this long without ice cream? If you have no idea what I’m talking about, then you probably have cooler friends than I do. Good for you! If you have some idea of what I’m hinting at, then you need better friends and you now have an idea about the kind of confusion I feel upon waking up in the morning. Except I am extremely aware that I need to pee.
Being this confused every morning is hard enough, but finding yourself in bed, surrounded by antiperspirant is an entirely new level of perplexing. This was my thought process each morning for the first few mornings waking up to my unexpected guests:
Morning 1: “Where am I? Grand Rapids? Yes? Yeah. It’s Monday, and I have to do things. What is this? Deodorant? Three deodorants? Is that the plural for deodorant? Deodori? That sounds best. Oh, I just threw this stuff on my bed and forgot to clear it off before I went to sleep. I can eat ice cream later.”
Morning 2: “Friggin deodori.”
Morning 3: “$^%%O*^%$^%#^%#$!”
Morning 4: “Shouting ‘MONEY SIGN, PERCENTAGE SYMBOL, EXCLAMATION MARK’ yesterday obviously did not intimidate this deodori.”
Morning 5: “Investigation. **Singing a made-up song in a blues-y manner** Gonna investigate the case of the deodori bum bum bum.”
Before I even got out of bed on morning five, I carefully smelled myself. “Maybe,” I thought, “I’m being overly-careful to make sure that I smell good the next day. Look at me...caring about others.”
Nope, that definitely wasn’t it.
Could I have deodorized something else? Indeed I could have.
There isn’t really anything else in my bedroom other than my bed since I’m poor. To make myself feel better about the severe lack of income, I pretend that I try to live like a minimalist. Material possessions always suck when I don’t have them.
This left me one choice. I must have applied deodorant to my wall. So like the hot stuff that I am, I got out of bed to smell my wall.
***Sniff...Confused Squint...Sniff Again...Squint Some More...AND...***
Found it!
Yeah that’s right, I put deodorant all over my walls. Now, I have taken Ambien to fall asleep for years which had led me to eat an unfortunate and unplanned amount of calories. It also causes me to put dry macaroni noodles on my ice cream before consuming which leads to chipped teeth. Sleep eating is a common occurrence for most people who take Ambien. However, I am the first person that I have ever heard of that has deodorant-ed their walls. For a second, I thought that this must have been an act of kindness on my part. I must care so much for my walls that I want to them to smell nice and have minimal pit-stains. Then I remembered that I’m not very nice. If I discovered that I sleep-harassed my walls, that would have made much more sense. Therefore, it must have been an act of vandalism! That would continue my streak of being mean and being bad at things! Sadly, deodorant to wall application is the worst act of vandalism that anyone could ever pull since deodorant rolls on clear and smells like fields of flowers. If I am a vandal, then I am the worst, but from now on I’d like to be referred to as: The Deodorant Vandal.
-Whitney, The Deodorant Vandal