Heathcliff

Heathcliff is the friend you have that’s completely a genius but also completely lacks common sense. Every group of friends has a Heathcliff. If you think yours does not, it is because you are the Heathcliff. This isn’t a bad thing. Heathcliff is also really friendly and helpful and good at cheering you up even when he’s not doing hilarious antics.

But the hilarious antics are probably one of the best parts of being friends with Heathcliff. Over the course of knowing him I’ve managed to convince him that “coming-out parties” are about being gay. I’ve also discovered that by the time he was a high-school freshman, he didn’t know that y was sometimes a vowel or that employers could make employees work on Sundays. But these are my two favorite adventures with Heathcliff.

For this first story, it is important for you to understand the layout of the first story of my house. For interpreting this diagram, please keep in mind that dark brown signifies a door, tan signifies an open entryway, and black signifies walls/other impassable areas.

I know, I know. I should just become an architect right now.

The idea you should be getting from this picture is that the first story of my house is “circular” in that it is possible to walk all the way around it and arrive in the place you started without having to open or close any doors. This will be important later.

Because we’re theatre geeks, Heathcliff, our friend Roxanne, and I were in the living room practicing a scene. After about two disastrous hours of this, we decided it was time for a break. We went into the “More Kitchen” area to get sodas (“pop”, to my Midwestern readers). After merely a few seconds, Heathcliff set down his soda and announced that he was going to the bathroom. Roxanne and I told him not to fall in, and waited for the bathroom door to close before turning to one another and speaking in unison.

Me and Roxanne: Let’s hide.

Immediately, I went for the coat closet, which is quite roomy and allowed me to stand among musty old coats (kind of like the wardrobe to Narnia, except less magical and with less snow) while sipping my ginger ale. The inhumanly flat Roxanne (who has about the physical dimensions of Flat Stanley) concealed herself in the toy closet on the other side of the house.

As I was clambering into the closet, my mother came down the stairs. She noticed me climbing in but didn’t think much of it, because even though my friends and I are around sixteen years old at this point, we still play hide-and-seek for fun. She went into the kitchen and started making herself some lunch when Heathcliff exited the bathroom. He went to the living room via the kitchen, exchanging a hello with my mom on the way.

Then he stopped.

There was an audible pause as he reached the doorway of the living room and realized that Roxanne and I were not there. I can only imagine his thought process here as he tried to work out what to do.

Heathcliff proceeded to walk all the way around the circle of the house, through the billiards room and the foyer. He came to the kitchen and then did another lap for good measure. When he got back to the kitchen he said to my mom, with complete seriousness yet sounding rather upset:

“Roxanne and Marina are gone.”

He didn’t say “I can’t find Roxanne and Marina”, or “Do you know where the girls went?” We are just gone. For all he knows, we have vanished off the face of the Earth.

My mother knows very well exactly where I am, and can probably guess that Roxanne is in the same place or somewhere similar. However, do you recall how maternal my mother is from her response to my having a fainting/seizure combo on an airplane? She said “Ugh.” So this is what she told Heathcliff, in the face of his almost tangible distress:

Yep. I probably have the best mom ever.

Instead of realizing that my mom was totally messing with him, Heathcliff promptly responded, “I’ll go check there.”

He ascended two flights of stairs to our (furnished) attic, presumably looked around, and came back down two flights of stairs to give the report. Roxanne’s experience of all this must have been very boring, but I could hear everything from my vantage point near the kitchen.

Heathcliff: They’re not there either.

My mother: Well, did you look in Marina’s room? Maybe they went up to get something.

Heathcliff obligingly and unquestioningly trotted up the stairs to check in my room, despite the fact that he had to pass my room to get to the attic, and probably would have noticed if Roxanne and I were in there. He returned moments later to say that we weren’t there, either. Now trying to get him to leave the house, my mother suggested, “Well, maybe Roxanne had to go home and Marina walked her there? Since Roxanne’s house isn’t that far away.” Heathcliff, however, was not buying this one.

Heathcliff: No, Roxanne’s dad is going to come pick her up. We already discussed this.

My mother: Oh. Well… maybe they went to rehearse in the basement?

Heathcliff: I was just about to check there.

Realizing that my mom was probably running out of places to send Heathcliff, I came out of the closet (pun intended) as soon as I heard him open the basement door. I skirted through the kitchen, flashing my very amused mother a thumbs-up, and reentered the living room. Trying to look nonchalant, I sat on the sofa along the right wall of the living room, picked up my script, and started perusing it as I continued to sip my ginger ale. I could hear Heathcliff’s anxious return to the kitchen.

Heathcliff: They’re not downstairs either.

My mother: Well, Heathcliff, I don’t know what to tell you. I don’t know where else they could be.

Heathcliff: I think I’ll just go to the living room and wait for them.

Heathcliff walked through the kitchen and then into the living room. I dutifully focused on my script and tried not to laugh. There was another audible beat.

I am trying so hard not to laugh here.

* * *

In our sophomore year, Heathcliff took Chemistry. Being primarily lazy, Casper and I decided to wait until junior year to do this, but we got to hear Heathcliff’s stories about the class. After a presumably very upsetting Chemistry lab, Heathcliff charged into the lunchroom like an angry soccer mom and put his binder and bagged lunch on our table.

Without giving either of us any time to react, Heathcliff—all in one breath—said, “Today in Chemistry we were working with chemicals and I know I didn’t get any chemicals on me or on the equipment but I think that the person who used the equipment before me might have gotten some chemicals on it so I’m going to go wash my hands now.”

This did not strike me and Casper as odd, because Heathcliff always washes his hands before lunch—unlike the rest of us, who use hand sanitizer and/or take our chances with dangerous chemicals. When Heathcliff returned to the table, looking even more distressed, we couldn’t help but joke about it. I said, “Hey Heathcliff, did you get the chemicals off?”

With complete seriousness and a hint of outrage, Heathcliff said, “No! I couldn’t wash my hands. There weren’t any paper towels.”

For a moment, neither Casper nor I could speak.

Then Casper said tactfully “Have you ever heard of this?” and imitated shaking water off his hands.

“Or, y’know, wiping them on your pants?” I added, demonstrating in case Heathcliff wouldn’t be sure what I meant.

Heathcliff did the thing he does when you catch him doing something utterly senseless; he indignantly said, “Whatever. I don’t know! Whatever.” He then proceeded to eat his lunch, very carefully holding his sandwich through the plastic bag his mother had lovingly packed it in.

After a few moments, Heathcliff knocked over his water bottle. The water spilled on Heathcliff’s binder, all over the table, and on Casper. Very slowly, deliberately, and unamusedly, Casper shook the water off his hands. Heathcliff make a sound kind of like “ERK!”, which is Heathcliff’s distress call. It sounds kind of like a cross between a car horn honking, the noise made by an enraged and startled wildebeest, and a swear word used by Martians.

He whipped a napkin out of his lunchbag (which begs the question: why did he not use the napkin instead of a paper towel?), wiped up the table, wiped the water off his binder. He then wiped off the mouth of his water bottle and took a drink.

If you’re reading this in stunned silence thinking, “But… wait…”, then you are seeing exactly what my brain saw.

I do not own these images. Thank you for the pictures, MS Word.

Me: Heathcliff…

Heathcliff: What?

Me: I, um… okay, wait, follow along with me here. You carried the binder from Chemistry to here. So the chemicals that were on your hands from the chemical-y equipment in Chemistry are on the binder. Then you wiped the binder with a wet napkin, so the chemicals are on the napkin now—right?

Casper: Yeah.

Me: Okay, right. So then you wiped the napkin on the mouth of your water bottle and you took a drink so now the chemicals are INSIDE you!

Heathcliff: … O_O ERK!!!!!!

Episcopal Alien

Or doing all three at once. Perhaps you remember me being…extremely talented?

I was raised Catholic, which has its pros and cons.

Pros:

• Our music is fantastic.
• We get a workout during Mass because of the amount of times we have to sit, stand, and kneel. It’s like we’re being trained by Billy Blanks right there in church.
• We always put on awesome pageants and I played Mary a lot, which is kind of like playing Donna in Mamma Mia! but holier.
• The presence in the Eucharist thing is admittedly kind of cool.
• Rosaries. I freakin’ love rosaries. They are probably my favorite part of Catholicism that actually has to do with belief.
• Pope John Paul II was kind of a BAMF, but not literally.
• We’re one of the biggest Christian denominations.
• I got to pick a Saint name when I got confirmed. I cheated and picked Kateri Tekakwitha, who has only been Beatified (but that’s two-thirds of being a saint, so technically she’s a saint if you round up) and is the patron saint of the environment, orphans, and misfits (like Captain Planet plus Oliver Twist). Also she’s the only Native American saint/almost-saint and her name means “she who bumps into things”.
• Catholic organizations contribute tons of money to worthy causes like reconstruction in Haiti and battered women’s shelters.
• Catholics have a really strong sense of community and it’s sometimes really special to feel like a part of that.

Cons:

• Catholics are conservative. Marina is liberal.
• Catholic Youth Groups repeatedly harass me to join fun organized events that are about Jesus. I like Jesus and all but I can’t imagine that He wants me to watch Juno and then talk about how it made me feel.
• Catholic organizations also contribute a lot of money to support causes that I am 100% morally opposed to.
• Sometimes when I’m in my church I find antiabortion pamphlets with pictures of dead fetuses on them and I’m not really sure what to think except “Ew. Children at this church could see this and be scarred for life! I’m scarred for life after seeing this.” It doesn’t really make me have sudden opinions about how horrific abortion is (because seriously have you seen a picture of a placenta? It’s just as bad. Like a bloody veiny octopus pancake). It makes me want to hit someone in the face with a hymnal for putting this pamphlet here.
• Sometimes people at the church assume that I have the same views as the church does and then they’re like, “Hey, you should go to this pep rally to oppose teaching about birth control in public school!” or something equally inane and then I have to stand there and figure out how to tactfully say “Actually, I support teaching birth control in public school” without untactfully saying “You’re a moron. We need to teach birth control in public schools. Seriously.”
• Sometimes I feel like the Catholic church is just really judge-y and pretentious. This is not true of all Catholics or all Catholic churches or all Catholic priests, but certain individuals who I have associated with the church give off that air.
• This one totally isn’t the church’s fault, but my priest back home gave really long sermons (twenty minutes, maybe?) despite the fact that he came to several good stopping places along the way. Although I never got to really play it, I totally invented a drinking game for Mass: you take a shot every time he plows right on through what would—for people who do not want to be in Mass for ninety minutes—be a spectacular concluding phrase.
  

But my mom is Catholic so I’ve spent all of my years going to Catholic church and actually helping teach CCD (religious education) to grade school students. I’m not sure why the church wanted me to teach for more than one year, but I did it anyway. I like to think that I planted a little seed of rebellious conscientiousness in them, but mostly all I did was teach them how to go to confession by introducing myself as Father Remus Lupin and having them say the Act of Contrition (the “sorry, God, I kinda messed up. Please still love me” prayer). I also got to sing solos at the church a lot and be in all the pageants. The church is sexist and they wouldn’t let me play the lead role in the Living Stations of the Cross even though I’ve always wanted to wear the fake blood makeup, but I got to play the lead female role so it was okay.

And yet… something was missing. Going to Mass made me feel kind of like a misfit, as if everyone totally noticed when I didn’t say all the petitions because I don’t share all your worldviews, Catholic church. It was like I was at a vegetarian convention but I’d snuck in a rack of ribs in my purse because ribs are so damn delicious and then every so often the vegetarians would look around and go “What the hell? Why do I smell barbecue sauce?” and I would be like “Haha, what? Don’t be ridiculous. There’s no barbecue sauce here, or a rack of ribs. And I especially didn’t bring them in so they’re definitely not in my purse.” And then all the vegetarians would look at me judgingly.

So now that I’m in college I decided to go to an Episcopalian church. I’ve heard that Episcopalians are “pretty much just like Catholics, but liberal”, which sounded totally like what I need. They let women be priests and they even had an openly gay bishop for a while. Also I was semi-drafted by my enthusiastic Episcopalian friend Lydia a few years ago:

Me: So I think I might be secretly Episcopalian.

Lydia: DO IT!

Me: …do what? There wasn’t an action verb in that sentence.

Lydia: DO EPISCOPALIAN!

Since there’s a four-hundred-year-old Episcopalian church right by my campus, I went on a Sunday evening. No matter what denomination you are, Sunday evening services are for students and people who are too lazy to get up for an earlier one.

By the way, the first font I used here is called “Catholic Schoolgirl”. Irony.

I know this isn’t true of all Episcopalian churches, but at this one, all the pews have names of famous people who used to go to the church. So I can sit there and think, “Oh my God, maybe I am sitting next to the ghost of Thomas Jefferson” during Mass.

Or service. “Mass” is just some way of putting it that Catholics totally made up just to mess with the other religions, I think.

Then Mass service started and I learned a few things about the music. For example, it’s totally the same as Catholic music. Except with different tunes. And the songs have different titles because sometimes Episcopalians think “Hymn 130” is catchier than the Catholic name for the song, “And He Will Raise You Up”.

Okay, maybe Catholics got that one right.

I had some fun adventures making up a new tune for the Gloria (Catholics sing it. Episcopalians kind of chant it to a tune with some music in the background) and not knowing all the words to their version of the Nicene Creed. Then the pastor (priest? Father? I’m not sure what he’s called in this case. Since apparently it’s not even a Mass anymore) started talking and he was British.

This is almost as good as the time we got a cute young Eastern European priest at my church. Except this time instead of pretending that I’m getting the sermon from Chekov, I can pretend it’s Sir Ian McKellan.

Everything else was pretty normal—readings and hymns and petitions, the usual—until we got to Communion. At Communion I would’ve been totally lost if I wasn’t sitting with a gang of Episopalian pals from my dorm. I just followed them.

Instead of going up to get Communion from Eucharistic ministers in an orderly and continuous line, we went up in bunches and knelt at an altar to get Communion from the priest. I’m really glad I had my Episco-Pals with me, because I totally would have just eaten the wafer when I got it otherwise. But since I was totally lost, I just watched them. They didn’t eat their bread. They just knelt there contemplating it like they could actually see Jesus’ face in it or something.

Mine totally didn’t look like this.

Then the girl came up with the wine and everyone dipped their bread in the wine.

Oh. My. God.

If you belong to a religion that regularly dips the bread in the wine, you cannot understand how cool this is. For me it was extremely cool. The girl giving the wine probably thought I was crazy, because when I got to dip the bread I was practically doing this.

Then we went back to the pews and no one else knelt for prayer. That made me feel all weird inside because of how well the Catholic church has trained me, so I knelt anyway and closed my eyes so that I couldn’t see my EpiscoPals looking confusedly at me. The Episcopalians didn’t kneel at any point during the service, so I can only conclude this is a Catholic thing and they were all wondering what the hell I was doing on the ground. No one else genuflected, either. It felt kind of like I’d been invited to dinner and then there weren’t any napkins—not really necessary to the dining experience, but most people are supposed to have those, really.

Still, it was a pretty good service and everything. As the processional was heading out, just when I thought it couldn’t get any better, the priest stopped and said, “Oh, by the way. There’s a free dinner for you guys right now. Come along to the parish building.”

The EpiscoPals and I quickly decided that yes we definitely want free food please, and skipped merrily along to a lovely dinner of pasta and marinara sauce and salad and delicious bread that was probably baked by angels. Then they served us an M&M tart. (Yeah. That’s dessert made out of candy.) Also they told me I could join the choir or volunteer to read whenever I want. And then they gave me a free shirt and told me that they’re going to give me free dinners every Sunday for the rest of forever.

Their Jedi mind tricks totally work on me.

So it looks like I’m Episcopalian now.

I’m like a fainting goat, but not

Apparently I have a tendency to faint with seizure-like symptoms. I have to say “apparently” because I keep missing it every time I faint. Now I always carry a camera with me, so next time I feel faint-y, I’ll whip out the camera and tell the closest person “I’m going to faint. Record it so I can see later.”

On second thought, maybe I won’t do that.

The first time I fainted in a way that got other people all freaked out (because who knows? Maybe I fainted before then but I was by myself and no one noticed) was in my senior year of high school. I was in Anatomy class, which might make some of you say “But Marina, it totally makes sense that you fainted there. Anatomy is gross” but that means some of you are wrong. We weren’t talking about eyes or teeth (the two anatomical things that gross me out), we were talking about wound healing and I wasn’t tired or hungry or anything, so there’s no reason I should have fainted.

But I started to feel really terrible (it got too cold and quiet and I was tired and lightheaded and my stomach hurt and I thought, Oh god, am I hypoglycemic? Why is this happening to me?) and it didn’t go away after I had reached my seven-second threshold for unpleasantness, so as the class period started to wind down I turned to my faithful friends, Red and Casper. (All names have been changed because I might embarrass my friends.)

Me: I don’t feel very well.

Red and Casper: *continue about their business*

Me: (more urgently) Like, I really don’t feel very well.

Red and Casper: *no response*

Me: Um, can you guys take me to the nurse?

Red: (suddenly concerned) Yeah, okay.

I don’t blame Red and Casper for what happened next. When I said “Can you guys take me to the nurse?”, they interpreted it to mean “I think I need a bandaid or something and I need to go to the nurse, but I don’t want to go alone so can you just drop me off there after class?” Being completely fair, that’s a totally normal request, especially considering that Casper and I get separation anxiety if someone doesn’t come with us when we go to the lunch line to buy food.

But when I said “Can you guys take me to the nurse?”, what I actually meant was, “Something is wrong with me so bad that I don’t think I can get to the nurse on my own, and I really need you guys to make sure I get there before I throw up or have a stroke or something.”

Fact.

Instead of sticking it out and just waiting for class to end before I went to the nurse, I decided to take matters into my own hands. And by this I mean, I decided it would be a good idea to lie down on a table.

(It has been pointed out to me that this was actually a better idea than standing/sitting up because lying down by definition gives better blood flow to your head. You guys, I don’t care that it was a brilliant survival idea that instinctive!Me decided to take. I still lay down on one of the long Anatomy classroom tables like I was ready for dissection. Not one of my best moments.)

Red and Casper got really alarmed now because I was lying down on a table with my eyes closed and apparently shaking. Since they’re totally awesome once they realize that there’s an actual urgent medical anomaly happening, Red went to get the teacher (for the purposes of this story I shall call him Mr. Unicorn) and Casper stayed with me so that we could have the following conversation:

Me: *gets up* What happened?

Casper: I think you just had a seizure.

Me: *still leaning weakly on the table* Seriously?

Casper: Yeah.

Then Red and Mr. Unicorn came over and I took a step toward them and then like a pansy I fainted again. Except Mr. Unicorn caught me this time because he has a summer job as a ninja and is totally prepared for what happens when students faint and start seizing without any warning.

The next thing I remember is opening my eyes on the totally unsanitary floor of the anatomy classroom looking up at Mr. Unicorn. He was all like “hey” and I was like “hi” and without even being asked he told me “you just had a seizure” and I was a little more unconcerned by this than I should have been.

Me: Were my eyes open?

Mr. Unicorn: What?

Me: When I had the seizure, were my eyes open?

Mr. Unicorn: Oh. Um. No.

Me: Oh. Then I wasn’t hypoglycemic.

(I’d read somewhere that if you have a hypoglycemic seizure, your eyes are open during it. Apparently this is not true, but since I had just probably had a seizure, I wasn’t really entirely savvy on trivia.)

Everyone apparently took my ability to correctly use “hypoglycemic” in a sentence as a sign that I probably wasn’t too brain-damaged or something, so they gave me a cookie and called the nurse. I don’t know what the hell kind of important emergency she was dealing with that was more important than Seizure!Girl right then, but in the time it took her to get there I could’ve had like twenty more seizures. The only good reason I can think of for her being so late is that one of the sophomores had turned into a zombie and she was helping control the outbreak before it took over the school. But it could just be because our school nurse had the nursing capabilities of a pack of gummy bears and the speed of a dial-up connection.

Still, when she showed up I got to ride to the nurse in a fun little wheelchair. But she didn’t even let me push the wheels myself. This was a major disappointment, but probably for the best because I would have just taken a spin around the school in the nifty little wheelchair and then she would’ve had to chase me.

Wait. Damn. That would have been awesome.

Then we got to the nurses office and she called my mom in the worst way possible.

“Hi, this is the high school. Your daughter just had a seizure.”

What the hell? Way to soften the blow. You don’t even know if I actually had a seizure yet. Are you a doctor? Probably not, a doctor would have let me drive my own wheelchair [citation needed]. But I guess it was effective because my mom and her coworker showed up.

Having a seizure in school makes you really important apparently, because the principal and my guidance counselor both showed up to check on me. Then I got to take my first ever ambulance ride. It was really cool because I wasn’t too sick or anything, so I kept looking around and texting my friends and annoying the EMT.

Me: What’s that?

EMT: It measures your heart rate. Do you have epilepsy?

Me: Why am I not wearing it right now?

EMT: You don’t need it. Do you have epilepsy?

Me: No. What’s in that drawer?

EMT: Have you ever had a seizure before?

Me: What’s in that drawer?

EMT: Tongue depressors.

Me: Ohh.

When we got to the Emergency Room they ran some tests, but the only one I really remember was the EKG. Doctors go for patients all the time [source: Grey’s Anatomy] so I figured I might as well try.

Cute Male Intern: So then I just have to put these suction cup things on your chest. Um, or we could get a female to do it if you’re more comfortable with that.

Me: No. You can do it.

Then we sat in the ER for a while and they eventually said “Well, we don’t know what’s wrong with you. Go home.” And that’s what the EEG people said a week later so I figured that the universe decided it would be totally chill if I was randomly narcoleptic and then danced the Cotteneye Joe in my sleep.

Fast forward a couple months. My mom and I went to California for the annual TLC conference even though she had meningitis at the time (story for another day) and got kinda sick on the way there and the way back. I was totally cool on the way there, but at about 3:12 AM on the redeye back I started to feel kinda bad, which quickly turned into “oh my God why is this happening again?!” I was a lot calmer about it this time and didn’t even ask for an escort, I just crawled out of my window seat and trotted to the flight attendants at the back of the plane.

Me: Hi. I don’t feel very well.

Stewardess: (much more concerned than Red and Casper initially were) Do you feel like you’re going to faint, or throw up?

I really liked that she gave me those options. She did it with the same courtesy that she offered me “Chicken platter or fish sandwich?” (The answer is chicken platter, obviously. Otherwise my whole area of the plane would smell like a fish market and that is totally not okay.)

Anyway, I told her I thought I was “probably gonna faint” and then all of a sudden I was attacked by a swarm of flight attendants who helped me sit down. I thought this was kind of unnecessary until I remembered that last time I fainted I freakin’ lay down on a table because I didn’t think sitting would work. So I let them sit me down and told them that I need apple juice and not orange juice because oranges are nasty and that hell yes I want an oxygen mask because the last time I was offered an oxygen mask I didn’t take it and it was a mistake.

Then I apparently fainted and started shaking again so they decided they should find whoever I was travelling with and eventually they did find my mom and they were all, “Is that your daughter who just went back there?” and she said “Yes” and they said “She just fainted and I think she’s having a seizure” and because my mom is super maternal and (after one time) got used to this sort of fainting thing she said “Ugh. Okay, hang on, I’m coming.”

So I got some juice and pure oxygen and the plane landed and then we went home. It’s kind of a joke now that I faint all the time like goat with a nervous disorder, but not everyone thinks so. When we told my nurse cousin about all this she gave my mom a really serious look and said “Cioci, if this happens again you should take her to get a CT scan.”

Apparently fainting goats aren’t funny to everyone.

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.