Because Nostalgia Is the New Black

So, nu. I was going through my brown accordion folder, a.k.a. that which is full of stuff I like, and I found the laminated copy of the drawing I did for the t-shirt we had made for my class's semester in Israel. The theme of the drawing, as I recall, was "The Last Hike," and it's basically cartoon eleventh-graders standing at the bottom of a large rock while our teachers look down at us and make fun of us for being pusses. David Mitchell is saying, "It's more of a nature stroll." Wow did that dude piss me off.

The path on the rock is filled in with very small quotes from our semester, and reading over them, I laughed out loud a number of times. I figured I'd reproduce a few here, and try and contextualize them, so everyone can laugh along with me! Yay! Right, guys? Guys? Hello?

"Can I get my soda? I left it in the soda machine."
--said by pretty much everyone at some point or another, as an excuse to leave the room during sequentials, which were our regular classes (French, math, English, etc.) as opposed to Core, our "Jewish-History-in-the-Land-of-Israel" class, which we, on the whole, enjoyed and did not try to get out of with bullshit. You could tell the sequentials teachers stuff like this though because they were all South African.

"Rooms 5 and 6, Etty was in TEARS this morning."
--said by our Madricha (counselor) Rivka. Etty was the small wrinkled Sephardic woman who resembled no one so much as Mother Teresa; she was allegedly the person responsible for cleaning our dorm's bathrooms. She never, ever did so, despite our seeing her street clothes hanging up in one of the girls' bathrooms. On Muss, the girls lived upstairs and the boys lived downstairs. We figured that Etty had a routine: she would come into our bathroom, change for the job at hand, and then go directly downstairs. She would do this because apparently the downstairs bathroom for (you guessed it) rooms 5 and 6 was like the monkey house at the zoo. Pee on the floor, poop on the walls--or so I heard. Thus, no one would or could blame Etty for getting overwhelmed, going outside to smoke a cigarette, and declaring herself done for the day. So no one's bathrooms ever got cleaned. She was a wily old bitch. On a related note:

"I know why Etty doesn't clean the bathroom: because I jizzed all over the walls!"
--anonymous, to protect the jizzer/s. I can't believe they let me put this on the shirt.

"Oh, Cecilia, your mom is a man..."
--Sung by our resident sad sack to the tune of "Cecilia," quietly, to herself.

"Can I BORROW your toilet seat?"
--Okay, so this is a longish one. Our headmaster from home came to visit us in October, I think, and we got to pow-wow with him about, you know, how everything was going, blah blah blah. Muss does this thing where they kick you out for two weeks (my best guess is so that they can send exterminators through the dorms again) and stick you with local families under the guise of "home-hospitality." I believe our headmaster came just before we were scheduled for our home-hospitality weeks, and he wanted to chat with us about it to relieve some of our anxieties. He told a story about a kid from a previous year who was staying with this Israeli family in the area, who put him up in his own wing of the house. Everything was lovely and peachy, except for one thing: his toilet didn't have a toilet seat. But this kid was a smart kid, and assertive, and he simply asked his family if they were aware that there was no toilet seat. They were surprised and laughed, and answered that they had been renovating that area of the house, and had forgotten all about the fact that they hadn't outfitted that bathroom with a toilet seat, and thank you for bringing it to their attention, and the kid got himself a toilet seat, and, presumably, was able to shit in comfort and in peace happily ever after.
We're all like, ha ha, okay, duly noted, Rabbi Redacted. Like that's going to happen.
See me. See me eat my words.
So I get to my home-hospitality house, and there's no toilet seat. But I'm not in a separate wing of the house, there's no renovation happening, and everyone's using the toilet as is. I suspect that this may be a classic "when in Rome" situation. Thus, I do without a toilet seat. I tell my classmates about it, and my friend Jack tells me that HIS h-h family has an extra toilet seat, and he will bring it to school for me. He does so. It is green. I didn't take it back to the house, but it was a lovely gesture.
A week into h-h, Rabbi Redacted comes back to talk to us about how everything's going. It comes up, as you may have imagined, and RR fixates not on the fact that I'm seat-less, but that Jack has managed to procure one for me. "What," he says, "did you just say, 'Can I BORROW your toilet seat?"?!

"Cancer break!"
--said by smokers when heading to the smoking lot. Irony will never be dead. Or not-irony. Or whatever the hell this is. Black humor, I guess.

"Deep-six me!"
--I have no idea what this is actually called; I can't find it as a definition on Urban Dictionary or a reference to it on the first page of Google for a search "'deep six' asphyxia," so I guess I'll just have to describe it. Stupid Person leans up against a wall with his arms crossed over his chest while Idiot Friend and Sadistic Weirdo push against Stupid's arms very very very hard. They do this until Stupid starts to pass out, I think, and then they let go. Stupid slides down the wall, twitching, and apparently newly enamored of the possibilities of auto-asphyxiation. This was as popular among the boys on the trip as hula hoops were in the late '50s. Let's just call it a craze.

"There was a fire."
"Do you want to see someone? Maybe the nurse?"
--Rob, then Susan, our South African math teacher. So what happened is that some combination of some of the boys set a fire in the dorm. One person got sent home for it. Rob's backpack, some school papers, and some clothes got slightly to moderately burnt in the fire, including a t-shirt that had pretty serious holes and scorch marks all over it. Rob decided to wear it, nipple-baring holes and all, to class shortly after the incident. Upon arrival at class, our math teacher took one look at him, and her mouth fell open. She asked him, "What happened?" The ensuing conversation is relayed above.

"Any of you guys do drugs?"
--Reuv, said in the middle of class, vaguely related to something he said, or was about to say, but I remember it as quite the non sequitur. Which is funny, because people who are on drugs often pipe up with non sequiturs. Form! Content! Form! Content!

"Don't fart in the Dead Sea! It burns!"
--said by Matt, in the Dead sea, speaking from recently-gained experience. He had, along with the rest of the class, been warned about this event by David, our teacher, who explained the anatomic mechanism that made it so. We learned so much about our anal sphincters that day. I suppose Matt didn't believe him, but then, in his anguish, chose to make his story public so that other might not suffer as he did. A true hero.

"If you can make it with Rosemary, why do you need a chicken?"
--said by Reuven, almost to himself, after Jack exclaimed, in a moment of culinary frenzy and anticipation, "I need a chicken! I can make it with rosemary!" Thanks, Reuvy, for that singularly disgusting image. That's why I share it. As Calvin (not John, "and Hobbes," silly) once said, "Nothing helps a bad mood like spreading it around." The same holds true for those things that make you ask for the brain bleach. Enjoy your night!