When one of my textbooks disappeared, I thought little of it—after all, I'm a foolish person and tend to lose things.
Then my ATM card vanished. I didn't think there was any criminal element involved, because nobody ever comes to my place. I figured I had just misplaced it.
But once my ""Buffy the Vampire Slayer"" season three, disc six disappeared, I knew I needed to start a hard target search—how else would I see the dramatic conclusion of Buffy and Angel's love?
After several hours spent turning my 9' x 13.5\ room upside down, I had found nothing.
Well, almost nothing. Instead of finding something that I owned that could be of use to me, I found old ECE 515 tests someone named Suvrat Budhaloti had taken.
Confused, I looked over the test. I had a relative certainty that my name was not Suvrat, and the complex equations on the inside of the test were nothing a Communication Arts major should ever have to view (we commonly just write ""I like movies"" for our tests).
And I don't even know what ECE means.
I decided to bring my roommate into the investigation.
""Pete, by any chance are you Suvrat Budhaloti, and if so, did you take ECE 515 in Spring 2005, and if so, did you get a 75 on your second examination, which you would have taken on April 26, 2005?""
Pete, whose name doesn't come close to being ""Suvrat,"" just stared at me.
But I wasn't at a dead end yet—I knew my Encyclopedia Brown-esque detective skills would come in handy. I quickly jumped on Facebook and looked up Suvrat to see nobody with that name had ever attended Wisconsin. Sure, it's possible Suvrat did exist and just wasn't on Facebook; however, I knew that if it's not on Facebook, it doesn't exist.
My Encyclopedia Brown skills also told me that polar bears don't eat penguins, because they're located on opposite sides of the world. This wouldn't help my investigation, but nonetheless, I found it fascinating.
Even more fascinating is when I looked on the ground and noticed Suvrat's tests slowly creeping under my bed. I flipped up the mattress and noticed what I had previously thought was common floor mold was actually—joy of all joys—an intergalactic black hole leading directly into the galaxy known as ""Dimension X.""
In this galaxy, I found my ATM card, my textbook and could see the thrilling conclusion to Buffy.
I can do so much more than that though. In this galaxy, I could log onto their Facebook at www.facebook.dx and learn all about Suvrat—he's a Pisces who's ""really into"" Harry Potter. Also, I'll never have to take out the garbage, because of my sweet little intergalactic trash receptacle.
But most importantly, I could do what every Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles fan had been wanting to do forever. I could punch the Neutrinos, the Dimension-X denizens who were such a horrible waste of everyone's time and an abomination of the series. They messed things up even more than the time traveling aspect of the third film!
The only bad thing about my discovery is, if I ever want to use my bed for something other than sleeping, like ... ""fort building,"" is what we'll call it, I know the bumping noises of my bed can be heard by an entire galaxy who will critique my form. It's a tad embarassing to think of their alien dialogue saying, ""You used the sheets for that!?!?""
