Recreational Spending

I think I need another bookshelf. I don’t really know where I’m going to put it. I already have four in my room. But, I’m starting to have to store books on the floor again, which generally means it’s time to start looking for another shelving unit. If I mention this to Roomie, she'll roll her eyes and shake her head.

It’s not that Roomie doesn’t like reading. She does. But when she was a kid, she didn’t dream about owning the library from Beauty and the Beast, so she doesn’t quite see the point in spending money on yet another bookshelf. That works out though, because I don’t really get spending money to swim under live wires.

Roomie did the Tough Mudder this past weekend. I, sadly, wasn’t able to watch her complete this because I was all preoccupied with graduating. Last night though, she told me all about it. Of course, to make the story complete, she had to first don the orange sweatband she received whilst running.

She showed me a map of the course and took me obstacle by obstacle. There were twenty-one and each of them sounded horrible, but some were a little worse than others. Roomie said that the one she hated most was charmingly named, “Arctic Enema.” It was a dumpster filled with freezing water and a couple inches of ice cubes floating atop. She jumped in and then had to fully submerge herself to get past the wood board in the middle and over to the other side where other runners were waiting to pull her out. Apparently it took about ten minutes before she could stop shaking.

Then there was the one where she ran through bails of hay that had been set on fire. According to her recounting, the smoke was worse than the fire. So she would just open her eyes to see far she’d be running straight and then run that with her eyes closed to protect from smoke. When she saw my shock over running blind through flaming hay, she assured me, “Yeah, but when we got to other side, there was an aid stand where we got banana halves.”

I couldn’t tell you if she knows someone who has stated that half a banana is so delicious they would walk through flames to get one, but I can assure you, it wasn’t me.

And of course, my favorite, the “Electric Eel,” where she had to slide on her stomach through water, above which dangled live wires. She got shocked about five times. At this point in the story I asked why in all of hell she would pay to do this and she said that the money went to charity. I pointed out that she could also just donate money to charity and skip the whole potential electrocution thing. She waved this off, saying, “It wasn’t really that bad. It was just like you got punched real fast.”

The one thing that made this whole thing a little less Hunger Games to me was the fact that everyone there was apparently more than willing to help everyone else. Roomie said that most of the obstacles couldn’t be completed on your own, so other runners were always around to help you finish the ones they’d already completed. Which is kind of awesome and a pretty clear example of why, in a zombie apocalypse, these are the people you’d want by your side.

That being said….I think I’m going to stick with my bookshelves.