I was dreaming. Not a particularly pleasant or bad dream, but the sort of dream that you wouldn't mind staying in for a while because at least the act of dreaming implies that you are asleep and don't have to deal with the endless stream of misfortunes that is life. The point is, I was taking a nap. And then there was a loud crash. My door flew open and in came a hulking figure with ominous shadows crowding the door behind him, roughly shaking me awake, saying, Keaton! We have to go right now!""
""But Aragorn,"" I whispered, groggy and slightly out of touch with reality, ""we tricked the Naz'gul into attacking stuffed pillows. We're safe, aren't we?""
Another shake of my midsection brought me back to the real world. The hulking figure was my roommate, Chuck. The shadows were a couple of his friends. And the look on his face was one of excitement.
""What do you want, Chuck?""
""We're going to buy some lobsters. Right now. And you're driving.""
I tried to muster the fortitude to issue forth a denial of his request, but what came out of my mouth would more appropriately be considered a concerned mumble. Sure enough, five minutes later I found myself putting on my coat and trundling to my car, Chuck and friends in tow.
You see, the thing about Chuck is that he's very highly motivated. Usually that term means one of two things: Either the person in question will do anything to get ahead (obligatory Monica Lewinsky reference here), or the person sits in the library all day and generally acts as a reminder to ourselves of all of our academic failures.
Chuck is different. Chuck isn't motivated to study for exams or pay attention in lecture, but instead he is motivated to do whatever it happens to be that he wants RIGHT NOW. When I first met Chuck, he told me he was going as the Jolly Green Giant for Halloween. The next time I saw him, he was wearing a costume of green felt and discarded pajamas. It was July.
Moral of the story here is that Chuck is a very immediate kind of guy. And what he wanted at that moment was lobster. Who am I to deny my roommate the joys of torturing and consuming crustaceans of unknown quality?
So we went to the grocery store. After several weird looks from the employees (come on, it's totally normal for four guys to buy some lobsters and wine on a Tuesday night), we picked out a couple of lobsters via criteria including claw size, suitability for an alien invasion movie and forehead space for laser attachment.
On the way back, however, Chuck had an attack of ethics. At least, that's what he called it when he decided that since the lobsters were still alive, they should be allowed to roam free before we boiled and ate them. And by ""roam free,"" I mean ""all over my backseat.""
A bout of screaming and dangerous swerves later and Chuck realized that terrorizing the driver with live lobsters may lead to harmful side effects such as hearing loss and death.
We made it home, relatively safe and sound. Chuck cooked up his lobsters, singing ""Be Our Guest"" and sprinkling pinches of this and that. And in the end, we learned an important lesson from our lobster adventure: Despite being ridiculously expensive, lobster really isn't that much fun to eat.
The next afternoon, when I took a nap, I locked my door.
Keaton has been woken up in a startling manner before. As a freshman, his roommate told him of his plans to get drunk a particular evening. Keaton went to bed, expecting that his roommate would perhaps stay out all night. However, Keaton was awoken at 3 A.M. by what he thought was a freight train but was actually his roommate opening the dorm room door and falling over, promptly passing out for the rest of the night. E-mail him at keatonmiller@wisc.edu
