Muffins, She Wrote...

On Fridays, I get the opportunity to stock one of the convenience stores on the campus of the university that I attend.  A C-Store is what they call it.  Each week, I arrive with cartfuls of food and beverages, balancing and in bulk.  Trays of Wild Cherry Pepsi.  Crates of chocolate milk.  5 tons of Chex Mix.

But one of the most-purchased items in the store are the muffins.  Moist, and the size of a Big Mac, these muffins are the best that $2 can buy.  But wait, there’s more! With the added bonus of— (sorry, I’ve been studying non-stop for my advertising final tomorrow).

Because the muffins are so popular, they run out very quickly and I frequently have to restock the entire shelf.  But a few Fridays ago, I interacted with a man who shook my very foundations of what I thought sanity was.  He only spoke one sentence to me.  Well, I may have been two, but I sensed a semicolon in there, joining two related clauses together, so I’ll just say it was one.  Maybe this isn’t even the proper use of a semicolon, but the guy didn’t exactly appear "punctuation literate" so I let it go.  I mean, maybe he found the semicolon to be aesthetically pleasing and was like, "Hey, use that!"

Anyways, this was what he said:  He was standing by the empty muffin rack, and upon my approach carrying a box of muffins, he said:

"Thank God you have muffins; I thought I’d have to kill someone."

And at first, I chuckled.  What a ridiculous thing to say to a complete stranger.  "Kill someone…"  What a joke.  Oh, the humors of hyperbole…

But as I handed him the muffin out of my cardboard box, something in me began to raise doubts.  What if he wasn’t kidding?

And I stood there, pondering, while the guy purchased his item and walked out the door.  He didn’t seem like a bad guy, yet I still toyed with the notion.  What if he killed someone because he didn’t get a muffin?

The thought ate at me all day, and I asked myself some very serious questions:

1. Would it have mattered what kind of muffin?  He seemed pretty adamant about reaching for the blueberry one I had.  If I had just brought over banana nut, would that have sent him over the edge?
2. Did he have a specific target in mind?  This question would have been cleared up if he had just said, “Thank God you have muffins; I thought I was going to have to kill Derek.”
3. He seemed eager when I walked in the door.  Did he know that I was the muffin man?
4. What is the ‘murder’ to ‘muffin’ ratio?  Is it one person per muffin?  What if he wanted two muffins?  Or, God forbid, a dozen?
5. Seriously, WHY THE HELL WAS IT A MUFFIN?

I began to think of the guy talking to his pointer finger, croaking, "Niffum.  Niffum!"

I think it’s because his quote is not the same thing as saying, "I’d kill for a muffin right now."  It’s a common expression, which everyone understands as an exaggeration.  And even if it’s not, there’s no specificity—it could be a reference to killing anything: "I’d kill this butterfly," "I’d kill this zebra," or even "I’d kill this six-pack in 20 minutes."

Somehow, inferring a single person, one individual, makes the situation all too real.

"I thought I might have to kill someone."  Was this guy psychotic or was I just overreacting?  I mean, it seems silly to assume that Otis Spunkmeyer just prevented a small-scale genocide.

I think it was the extremism of the statement.  There was no lesser punishment for the lack of muffin.  He wouldn’t have beaten anyone up or threatened them verbally.  No muffin?  Homicide.  Assault is for pussies.

Or perhaps he assigns different levels of violence to different low-fat grain food products?  Popcorn is a hit-and-run.  Nurtigrain Bars constitute rape.  But fortunately, Sun Chips only count as indecent exposure.

I want to keep the store stocked full, just in case.  The last thing I want to do is inspire the latest "ripped-from-the-headlines" episode of Law & Order: Special Muffins Unit.  So now, I make sure I bring extra cases of muffins.  The store clerk always gives me confused looks, as if I’m demented for overcompensating our supply of muffins.  It would be too much work to explain to her that I am her knight in plastic wrapping, so I just tell her:

"You may never fully understand, but you’re welcome."

Then I disappear, someone’s secret muffin savior.  I don’t expect to receive any thanks.  It’s just better this way.

The Pinkest Eye

Last Thursday was a long day.  I was getting railed by my Spanish class, and I occasionally lost vision in my right eye.  Y’know, a typical Thursday.

On top of everything, “The Office” was a rerun!  (And it wasn’t even good enough of an episode for me to want to see it twice.)

You see, Thursdays are my typical social night, when my friends come over to watch TV, consume beverages, and see what other mayhem we can get ourselves into (which generally consists of breaking something in my apartment).  During this week’s process, I became worried about the loss of 50% of my eyesight and did what any well-educated college student would do—I flicked my eyelid repeatedly, using a method that I had learned from “fixing” poorly-wired headphones.

I flicked and rubbed at my eye and began to pick out large specks of crust until silently excusing myself from the festivities, where I checked my face in the bathroom mirror.  Not only was my eye inflamed and pink, but my lashes were coated with a gooey yellow syrup that I was certain no one would find attractive.

I had the virus.

The world seems to have a problem with pink eye.  A real problem.  And while my biggest beef has to do with the name—really, “pink eye”?  Are you coming down with a case of “pansy nose,” too?”—society has decided it pertinent to make people suffering from pink eye feel as ostracized as possible.

It sucks big time because I don’t own a pair of sunglasses, so my eye acts like a scarlet letter on my face (“I”), notifying everyone around me that I have been infected… and I am contagious as hell.

Conjunctivitis is one of the worst infections to have, because no one ever has any pity for you.  Obviously, the symptoms themselves are not pity-worthy (a slight itching sensation and a bloodshot eye spewing tablespoon after tablespoon of sludge), but people get downright frustrated when a pink eye sufferer comes near.  At least with cancer, people get sympathy (sometimes even empathy), but with pink eye, you get treated like a leper, or even a communist.  Every person you encounter interrogates you from a considerable distance: “Are you, or have you ever, touched any of my things with your bare hands?”

It’s an ocular infection, people; not exactly the red scare you should be worried about.

My biggest problem was my work schedule required me to go into the store the next day after self-diagnosing my ailment.  While I didn’t want to spread my bacteria to the entire GVSU campus, I also felt hesitant about calling my boss in the morning to tell him that I couldn’t stock today because my eye was a tad itchy.  All I wanted to do was fly away to somewhere where no one would judge me, but I was worried that taking the red eye anywhere at this point was too ironic.

I did my duties with my gaze cast at the floor the entire time, which likely gave off the impression that I had been crying all morning, rather than picking out eyeball grit with my fingernails.

It suddenly hit me today that it has almost been an entire week that I’ve been consistently denying that I’ve been smoking pot or that I haven’t been getting a decent amount of sleep.  These are ridiculous accusations, as I have been sleeping like a (stoned) baby.

So even though my conjunctiva are still shot with blood and I still have yet to look anyone in the eye through fear of infecting them via my sense of sight, I keep my spirits up.  Because now, all of my friends have pink eye, as well.  We have a lot to talk about.