I watch too much Criminal Minds

No, seriously.

If you’re a teenager/young adult and you’re out somewhere with your “relatively normal” mother and you see someone of the attractive sex, I’m guessing your mother will elbow you and be like “Ooh, look. (S)He is so cuuute! You should go talk to him/her.” And then you go “Mooooooooooooom” in a way that sounds kind of like “I can’t believe you said that out loud in a grocery store. Why are you doing this to me?!” and she pretends that she doesn’t know why you’re upset even though she’s probably laughing at you inside.

My family doesn’t do that. My family is a family that watches Criminal Minds together. So if my mom and I are out somewhere and we see someone who is vaguely suspicious or has gross facial hair or is eating/sitting by himself or is wearing a hoodie, my mother will elbow me and be like “Oh my God. He’s totally an unsub.”

(For those of you who don’t watch too much Criminal Minds, “unsub” is what they call the bad guys who try to Hannibal Lecter people or kill kittens or whatever. Also they usually wear hoodies. But I’m almost entirely sure that kitten-killing bad guys is a plot they haven’t covered yet. CBS—free ideas. Right here. Just make it so I can meet Thomas Gibson and/or Matthew Grey Gubler.)

Matthew Grey Gubler (he plays Spencer Reid and is also the current voice of Simon from Alvin and the Chipmunks), by the way, is kind of crazy but also awesome at the same time, as far I can gather from his website. It’s called Gublerland. He has an entire land. I know all these things because he used to be in a leg brace due to what I believe was a tragic dance-off incident, so when my sister found out she had to wear a scoliosis brace, we emailed him through his website. He made himself “brace buddies” out of cloth when he was in his leg brace and we were thinking maybe we could buy one for my sister from him. The answer was no, we couldn’t, but they sent us a really nice consolation email:

Thank you so much for the super kind words. Matthew treasures your support, thoughtfulness, and great spelling. Sadly, (as much as he wishes he could) it's physically impossible for Matthew to personally respond to each and every letter we get here at Gublerland. So it is my job to make sure the super special letters, like this one, are printed out for him to read, enjoy, and save forever in a special place

Unfortunately there aren't any brace buddies available right now. Hopefully in the future. Thanks for watching! Again, Matthew thanks you from the bottom of his heart.

Love,
Geeselund the Mail Monster of Gublerland

p.s. I have attached a photograph of me reading your letter, as well as a picture of a baby otter. cheers!

Oh, holy crap, people.

I swear I could never make that up. Matthew Grey Gubler. Really.

Anyway. I moved into college last month and oh dear god, do you have any idea how many Criminal Minds episodes take place on college campuses?

The answer is “three that I can think of off the top of my head”. Probably more. I don’t know. It’s like a lot of serial killers have nothing better to do than hang out in Intro to Philosophy classes. Even though my college is in probably one of the safest, sleepiest towns in the state and even though my college has trusty blue lights, I’m still really paranoid about being kidnapped by unsubs who are either disguised as people I would trust or are actually police officers/fellow students who just really want to kidnap people.

Because guess what? That happened on Criminal Minds too.

That’s why when I walk across campus at night in attack mode. Apparently some of my top choice weapons against attempted midnight kidnapping are “prohibited” because “mace” and “blades over three inches” aren’t something we should have. Then what the hell is the point of there being a fencing club, college? That is a club solely dedicated to teaching people how to fight with weapons over three inches in length.

But I make do with the weapons the college gave me. Whenever I walk across campus at night I do it with my hand like this:

Come at me, unsubs. I dare you.

That is my hand holding my emergency whistle poised to blow, with my room key (thicker and better for scraping/gouging) and my mailbox key (thinner, pointier, and stabbier) clamped between my fingers like homemade ninja shanks.

I don’t know how loud my emergency whistle actually is because I’ve never tried to use it. I think about blowing it just to make sure it works, but I don’t want people to think I’m actually having an emergency and run over ready to save the day and then not have an emergency to fix. If that happened I would probably have to fake a fainting episode so that everything was legit and I wasn’t “the girl who cried wolf with her emergency whistle”. Because then if I had a real emergency no one would help, and my last thought would be “Damn it. I shouldn’t have tested my emergency whistle that one time.”

The whole setup would probably be more effective with mace. But beggars can’t be choosers. And I’ll just settle for stabbing over blinding. I can probably get to a blue light in time if my emergency whistle doesn’t actually work.