Rest in Pieces

I have not always been the sweet, kind girl that y'all have come to know and love.

When I was in college, my roommate Nadira (in the center) was an exchange student from Turkey. English was her third, or possibly fourth language. She was completely fluent, but the nuances of American slang were lost on her.

Like many colleges ours had legends that passed from year to year. One of which being that if your roommate died, you automatically got straight A's for that semester. It was called the "Grief Rule".

Some one told Nadira this and she asked me if it was true. Of course I said that it was.

Then, I turned evil.

Every night before she went to sleep I'd tell her to "rest in peace". For months, she thought that this meant simply "sleep well" and so she began saying it to other people. Who looked at her oddly, but no one said anything, figuring, I suppose that it was some idiom that failed to translate correctly from Turkish to English.

We had one class together, Abnormal Psychology. On Halloween, the class loaded into a yellow school bus and took a two hour trip to Well Springs. The local asylum for the mentally ill. While there we toured the grave yard. As the professor lectured about how the insane are often abandoned by family members Nadira spotted a head stone. That said "rest in peace".

It took me three weeks to convince her that I wasn't ACTUALLY trying to kill her, I was just teasing her.

(semi-relatedly: Those hula hoops? OMG did we have fun with those. Looking back, it's a wonder we weren't repeatedly sent to the RA's office for screeching as we tossed bottle caps tiddlywinks style down the hallway and into the hoops as a drinking game. Or hula hooping in the elevator (harder than you'd think), or rolling them with chop sticks while someone pushed us in rolling office chairs in a race to the end of the hallway (also a drnking game). Mostly at about 2 in the morning.)