Remembering that the so-called 'quiet hours' begin at ten and remembering that I was bitchy because I had only had four hours of sleep the night before, try to picture the following scene:
I leap out of bed, stomp across the floor as loudly as one can stomp in socks (my apologies to whoever inhabits the room below mine), and open my door. I squint my eyes in anticipation of the disco ball and flashing floor tiles that should rightfully accompany the racket, but find only a typical dorm hallway. So I walk past a door or two in my plaid pants and my "You're Just Jealous Because the Little Voices are Talking to Me" T-shirt, trying to locate the set of Saturday Night Fever.
Turns out it's coming from behind the door of the room right across from me. So I pound angrily on the door, figuring that one look from a sleepy, bitchy, rumpled Diversity Editor will be enough to silence the whole floor. Unfortunately, the music is too loud for the humans behind the door to hear my knocking.
So their suitemates (naturally) come out of the room next to them. This random guy looks at me and says, "What?" What? It's 12:30 in the morning, I haven't slept in days, you're playing DISCO of all things, and I just wanted to stop by and have a friendly chat about politics and the stock market!!! What do you think, "What"?!?!?!!!! "It's kinda loud and I'm trying to sleep, do you think you can keep it down?"
The guy looks at me as if I've just said, "Excuse me, have you seen my periwinkle and burgundy cactus? I think I may have left it next to the purple monkey dishwasher."
He says, "Okay, I'll tell them," and ducks back into his room, unfortunately not smacking his head on the doorframe.
So I go back into my room and stomp back to bed (sorry again downstairs neighbors). Of course, the disco doesn't stop or get lowered, and now we have the added pleasure of people going in and out of rooms, slamming the doors behind them. I take a chance at death and ask my roommate (our own Diversity Editor2), "Jess, are you still awake?" She responds affirmatively, and we decide to go out for a drive, since there seems to be no chance of sleep anyway. Knowing how cold it is outside, I put on jeans and such again before we leave. My roommate, on the other hand, opts to go out in blue pajama pants with little penguins all over them, and a neon-yellow Tweety Bird nightshirt.
Flip scene: my roommate's car. It's covered in three inches of solid ice and I'm thinking, "Oh damn, we're never gonna get out of here." Before I can even wonder how my roommate feels about all the ice on her car, she exclaims, "Pretty!" I want to start scraping all the ice off her car, and she wants to go back to the room, in the cold, to get her camera because, "It's sparkly!" I convince her of the lack of wisdom involved in this idea, and she produces a six-foot tall metal expandable/retractable ice-scraping/brushing thing, and a four-inch rubber squeegee. I choose the large weapon-thing and start scraping away at her back windshield. The noise is worse than nails scraping against a blackboard, and slowly drives us both to madness.
Meanwhile, Jess uses the stupid squeegee to scrape away a snowflake at a time on her side windows. After a while we get bored and cold and the windows are sorta clear by now anyway. So we climb inside the car and shut the door, all prepared to drive away from hell and John Travolta and take a field trip to a diner, only to find out that...the car won't start.
That having been discovered, we go back to our room and fall asleep to the soothing sounds of Saturday Night Fever.