Snow Days Part 2: A Literal Pain in the Butt

Excuse my crude language. Yesterday WMATA (Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority) finally opened the above ground metro, and some friends and I thought it would be brilliant to go take some pictures of the monuments in the snow. About 10 minutes after arriving on the Mall, my roommate and I were standing on an icy patch (i.e. THE MALL--it was almost entirely iced over) and my feet decided to go one way and everything else went down. I hit my tail bone hard on the ice and pavement. After about five minutes of blurred vision, hearing loss, and the worst pain I've ever felt in my life (maybe one day I'll get the chance to see how it compares to child birth), temporary blindness and hearing loss subsided into intense nausea and the pain went from unbearable to merely excruciating. Yeah, leaving the house was brilliant idea.

This isn't the first time I have bruised my tail bone. Believe it or not, there is an even better story than falling on the National Mall during the worst snow storm in the past 100 years. Oh yes. My freshman year of college. I had already asked one guy to the "Preference" dance and been rejected. David had been my homecoming date and lived on my cousin's floor in the dorms. None of the girls on my floor would ask boys until I did, so I filled David's room with balloons that had some form of the following message inside: "Will you go to Preference with me?" Supposedly my cousin had done his research. David had not been asked to preference and would assuredly say yes. Or so I thought...

Instead, David had been asked by three girls and took several days to turn me down. And when he did turn me down he sent my cousin over to my dorm with a bag of popped balloons and a note that read: "Sorry to burst your bubble, but I am someone else's preference for preference." Apparently I had literally wasted my breath (blowing up all those balloons) in asking him.

I was done. Finished. I felt no need to ask another boy to Preference. Let's be honest, freshmen dances are kind of lame. But then my next door neighbor, LaurieAnn, decided that I needed to go to the dance. She had someone all picked out for me to ask--Travis, her date's roommate. After several days of telling LaurieAnn that I did not want to ask Travis to the dance, I caved. LaurieAnn not only planned that I would ask Travis. She also planned HOW I would ask him and how he would respond. I don't remember exactly how I asked him, but it was Star Wars related. He said yes by coming over to my dorm in a Jedi costume with a light saber and said: "I would be de-lighted to go with you." Cute.

So no freshman dance is complete without a pre-activity. For this particular pre-activity, we took the bus to the ice skating rink for the Engineering-Nursing Colleges ice skating activity. LaurieAnn's date was singing in a concert and would meet up with us later. So she decided to ask Travis to teach her how to ice skate backwards, leaving me, a horrible ice skater, to fend for myself. Even though I was merely inching along the edge of the rink, I wiped out. Skates went forward and tail bone went down on the ice. LaurieAnn and Travis didn't even come help me up. My butt hurt for the rest of the semester every time I sat down. Even better, LaurieAnn flirted with Travis the whole night, even after her date showed up, stalked him in the ensuing weeks, and they started dating. Obviously the injuries I sustained have not impacted my memory.