Nobody Asked Me, But…

Week 2

Before I begin, I’d like to preface this article with the statement that it is not my parents’ fault that I have turned into Homer Samson. No; they took the greatest of care in raising me, teaching me the proper way to vacuum a room (in a V-pattern, at least fifteen times a day, or however often the integrity of the V is threatened), offering me the latest in clothing from such fine establishments as Sears (home of power tools and ill-fitting clothing guaranteed to ensure high mockability by other schoolchildren), and exposing me to culture, almost always in the form of the Church of Aurora Craft Faire.

Therefore, I can only assume that it is college that made me this way.

All I know is, before I came here, I considered pro wrestling just another show about sweaty men hugging each other, not unlike "Home Improvement." I only ate things that had once been recognizable parts of animals, or at least definitely come from an animal, and if pressed I would not only deny that Britney Spears was capable of anything besides making old men and pock-marked teen boys randy, I would deny that she even existed.

And yet here I am, sitting in my room wearing a do-rag, waiting for my friend to get back so I can dye my hair champagne blonde, wishing they would have chicken rings for dinner in Convo sometime this week, listening to "Oops! I Did It Again!" for the fifteenth time (you know, that Britney is just a genius! I mean, come on, look at the way she spells her name!), and counting the minutes until tomorrow night, when, if all goes according to plan, Ric Flair will be showing up on Nitro to stop the wedding of his son to Miss Hancock.

And that’s not even all. Because overriding all of that, like a giant foamy wave of low culture, is my fiery desire to go bowling.

Never in my life have I thought to myself, "boy, you know what would be fun? Going to a big, noisy, smoky room, putting on someone else’s shoes, picking up a polished rock and hurling it down a greased up lane! Wooooooooo!"

But this is my last semester, which meant I had to do what I had been dreading for so long: take my final gym. Having taken recreational crafts for my first gym (a result, I suspect, of one too many trips to the Craft Faire), I waited as long as I could for them to offer pistol shooting, which sounded like fun, mainly because then I could pretend I was one of the Charlie’s Angels.

But time finally ran out, and bowling was the only thing that fit into my schedule. So, with much reluctance, I signed up.

Now, I am an unstoppable bowling force of death.

I’ve even doubled my average, which sounds impressive, but really isn’t, when you consider my average before I signed up for the class was 45, which was achieved by an ingenious bowling strategy in which I swung my arm for about fifteen minutes before letting the ball go to its rightful home, the gutter. Most of my pins were actually knocked down by my dad, who, in an effort to end the game within a five hour time frame, would run down the lane and kick the pins over while I was concentrating on swinging the ball.

So it may not exactly be high tea with the queen. But bowling is the only sport I know of in which drinking and smoking are not only encouraged by expected (although I think basketball would be at least fifty times better if the players ran around with Coors pounders and Camels dangling from their lips.) And if bowling makes me a lowbrow, then so be it. Because deep down in my heart, I know that a girl who can make the perfect V on a carpet may be respected by her peers, but it’s the girl who can take out the seven-ten split after three beers that gets the dudes.