The Thing in the Corner

I moved into my dorm room in January not knowing what to expect. I didn't know any of my roommates and was terrified that they would be very "Mean Girl"-esque, or just horribly anti-social (like that awkward girl from Gilmore Girls). It turns out, none of us had to worry (my roommates were terribly anxious that I would be awful as well). After our required time of being around each other long enough, we all decided we were okay and, thankfully, not serial killers.

But here's the interesting thing about my room: we have a habit of losing things in the black hole that sits in the corner of our room. It hides from us most of the time - we can't actually find it, though we've tried looking - but it comes out at night when we're sleeping, or when we're not in the room during the day.

And it eats things.

Like our remotes.

We, as a room, have bought three or four new remotes for the TV this semester alone. And over the course of the semester we've tried several ways to avoid losing it.

We have a penguin stuffed animal (one of those hilarious little penguins from the movie Madagascar), and one of my roommates - in a burst of true genius - tied the remote to the penguin. TO the penguin! We called it our penguin remote and were actually very happy with it (this is not sarcasm in case anyone thinks it is, we're very serious about our penguin remote) until the poor remote was somehow detached from the penguin. And, (surprise!) it got lost into the miasmic maw of the black hole almost immediately...

I keep waiting for it to eat other things. Like my final papers ("I'm sorry professor, the black hole in the corner of my room ate my paper, I should just get an A"). Or the DVD remote (apparently it doesn't like the taste of the DVD remote because we only lost it once and then it mysteriously turned up again a few days later...). And I especially keep waiting for it to eat the extra slices of pizza my roommates left on the counter from this weekend but don't want to throw away... but, nope, it just likes the taste of the remotes we buy.

So, moral of the story: tie your remote to a penguin and it will be safe from remote-hunting, predatory black holes .