The first episode of Mythbusters I ever saw and truly enjoyed (at least until Kari permanently joined the crew) disproved the myth that running through rain will keep you drier than walking. Quite the opposite; running through the rain weighs you down with a significantly greater amount of water.
I should be in German class. I left Brit Lit to find it sprinkling. I get on my bike and begin to pedal, and lo, with a great whoosh came the deluge. If running soaks a person more than walking, how much wetter would a person riding a mutant bike inexplicably hitting 20 mph?
I couldn't stand the thought of sitting in German drenched. Wenn es regnet, fahre ich mein Rad nicht gern. Except when I do, and I get soaked through three shirts, and end up styling my hair oddly. And then, I don't go to class. I go home. And write bloated emails which could really use a good pair of scissors and a well-loved copy of Strunk and White's.
And look like this after taking off a bookbag AND a jacket AND a hoodie:
I don't think the rain made my glasses crooked like that, but I dunno, it WAS raining pretty hard.
My previous hydrodramatic event happened sunday afternoon as I was coming back to my apartment after some coffee and skimming Salman Rushdie in a desperate attempt to catch up in my Brit Lit class. I noticed at the top of my stairs that there was water pooling in the little area between the three doors on my floor. I just thought someone had spilled something, and didn't think anything of it. I saw more water in my apartment, but again, didn't think anything of it.
I sat down on my bed and busied myself with German homework. a couple activities in, I decided to get a drink from the fridge, at which point I noticed that my kitchen floor was shiny. Then I realized it was wet, and that the squishy sound I was hearing was not, in fact, some weird sound effect on Car Talk, but my freaking carpet. Somehow, my toilet tank had broken, the plunger didn't plunge properly, the water kept running, but it didn't drain like it usually does, and I was now standing in an inch of toilet tank water.
I stood there for at least a full minute as what was happening occured to me in very tiny increments: water, inch-deep, my shoes are wet, hey so is my laundry I just did, hey, i had some homework on the floor over there I was working on, hey, hey, hey, oh no.
I called Elizabeth, bless her heart, asked her to bring over a few towels, seeing as how my entire apartment was flooded, called my not-very-helpful-but-very-old-lady-on-vaction-in-florida landlady, and then I called my mom for advice--she ran next door and borrowed a shopvac.
In day-to-day life, I am master of hyperbole. Not really master, per se, because I overuse it without thinking, overhyping everything. Elizabeth thought this was the case--that "my entire apartment flooded, can you bring a few towels" meant that I spilled a coke and didn't have a dry towel to mop it up with.
My mother, on the other hand, has known me long enough to know that I understate catastrophies, so as to mask my complete inability to function under such circumstances.
So I: got everything off the floor, or anyway if it wasn't THAT important, put it by the couch and bookshelf, because the floor by them somehow stayed dry, booked all of my wet clothes and bedclothes to the laundromat with the thank-God-I-bought-that laundry detergent and $20, which got almost completely used up doing laundry and what wasn't used up went into late-night, post-clean-up Taco Bell for Elizabeth, my mother, and I, but my mom got into town with almost literally a bajillion towels and the shopvac while I was at the laundromat so elizabeth stayed there and did my laundry for me because I needed to go back to my apartment and clear out everything I could while my mom tried (somewhat unsuccessfully) to shopvac up all the water or at least keep it out of my closet so I could start putting stuff there so I could get it off the carpet because I had to tear up all the carpet with a pair of crappy scissors I've had since like fifth grade and meanwhile I'm absolutely soaked and freezing and pissed and crying no weeping and still laughing and taking a break to make coffee because thank you both for coming and helping me out and then the scissors gave out but there was still wet carpet everywhere, so my mom went to meijer to get new scissors and some garden pruning shears which really in the end worked better than scissors anyway, even though the cut was a lot messier. Look how wet I got:
Pretty gross, huh?
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