phthalombrage | (no subject)

They really did!
"Something is not right," I thought, à la Miss Clavel, when I looked into the wide, vacuous, lemurish liquid brown eyes of the girl assigned to be my bagger. Her name was Maddie. She was ghostly white and had short, curly brown hair. Wrapped around her neck was a navy blue scarf that only made her look more disarming and defenseless. She wasn't hungry.
Then I found out what was wrong.
"What are you majoring in?"
"Drama."
Silence.
Mallory came over to talk to her, and I found out she was from Boston, but I couldn't bring myself to be terribly excited even though Boston is one of two places I love. I mentioned that I'm from Florida, did the awkward weather/seasons thing, and restored the awkward silence. She didn't really want to look at me after I told her I was a prospective engineer and described my class schedule.
Though I had requested two, I thought they had only assigned me one bagger until this other girl appears. She was Asian. She told me her name (Malina, sp?) and disappeared to the other side of Rangos to go chat with a friend.
The entire group left, but I had difficulty collecting my second bagger. First of all, I had forgotten what she looked like. Secondly, I couldn't bring myself to approach her once we did find her. Bagger #1 must have been floored in awe of my 1337 social skills.
Rigel and I walked them back to Donner, describing various things along the way. I got them into my room and invited them to come up with me to the third floor, but one wanted to go off with her friend from high school and the other just plain didn't want to hang around with me and made up some other excuse. I just kind of left, feeling weird about leaving them in my room, but I wanted to get away from these strange and hostile people.
The third floor baggers were all right. I didn't particularly like any of them, but they were much better than mine. By some cruel trick, all of the third floor CIT kids got baggers looking at CIT, unlike me. We showed them around campus some and ate at Skibo (CMU's Powers that Admit gave them food cards that didn't activate until 8 PM so we burned DineX). Phillip randomly came over halfway through the meal and sat down, and it was kind of awkward that we all left him sitting at the two adjacent round tables, surrounded by 13 empty chairs...
I ran into my baggers on the way out. They said they couldn't get into my room. I wasn't surprised. Maddie and I exchanged cell numbers. Malina didn't seem to care. Then I went to dance.
I called my mom in the time before dance. Ashley wasn't there, so we went over what we had already learned. I didn't get the memo, but for some reason, Karl was there. I like Karl, so I didn't mind. Anyway, it was kind of an unproductive practice.
On my way out of Morewood, Maddie calls wanting to be let in like some kind of confused cat. I'll be there in ten minutes. They obviously aren't there. I get there before them. She says she ran into someone from summer camp. So I take one of the Emily Baggers to Schlag to visit Mitchell. Yet more awkwardness ensues. Apparently some other girl came to see him and climbed all over his bed. Emily hugged him twice, and he stood there like a mannequin. Maddie calls and says she's at my door with "like two other people" and wants to get her stuff "so they can go stay with someone else." At that time, Mitchell was using Emilybagger's phone and Emilybagger was finding pictures of Mitchell on her facebook. More waiting. I was also afraid to leave knowing that my stalker was in the Schlounge.
In any case, we got back to Donner to see like six Asians and Maddie camped out in the hallway. Both baggers removed their stuff, and someone named Krista said they were taking an 8:30 AM yoga class and didn't want to have to go pick the girls up. Then I went upstairs.
We built up interest in Mitch by having a reading of Alex's Mitchell fanfic, introduced them to "Mom", almost got Alejandro and Andrew Ugalde to play gay chicken, and chatted in the hallway about grades, colleges, and other shit-boring things. We then took a clump of people (Emily 1, Emily 2, Rigel, Mallory, Alejandro, two guys whose names I forget, and me) over to pay Mitch another visit. This time we got a photo. Mitchell was angry. Alex wasn't wearing a shirt, so I stayed out in the hallway. We cut across the Schroof to B Tower to see Steven, the boy Mallory ~~stalks~~ eats breakfast with. Again, awkward. Rigel went away, presumably to do work or talk to Shawn again, and the rest of us went to visit Architect's Leap again, Doherty, Newell-Simon Hall (the Roboceptionist was closed), Hamerschlag Hall, Scaife/Roberts, etc. after picking up loud Emily's Pitt student boyfriend, Ryan. There's some weird construction operation going on behind Hamerschlag, where we showed them the hull. Passing through Wean, we showed them the Cluster (where I have yet to officially lurk). Loud Emily was really excited for the mac labs, but when she got to The Cluster she commented (loudly) that there were no girls. Then the girl in the room piped up. Emily said she hadn't seen her and thought she might just be another long-haired guy. It was awkward (theme of the night?). We burned the last DineX at Entropy, and I took Emily/Ryan to Schlag one last time so Ryan could see Mitch. Mitch likes Ryan. He's a quiet guy. Mitch really hates Emily. He would hate my calling him Mitch, too. He spent the whole time insulting Emily and making sarcastic comments. Some curly-headed shirtless music major wandered over at the sight of the commotion reading some piece of music. Mitchell said "inept" and the music guy said he didn't know such big words. "Inept contains five letters," replied Mitchell, laughing his ugly Mitchell-laugh and WINKING at me. He doesn't know me, but he knows that I'm friends with his roommate, Alex, and had once been on the floor to get and return math notes to Mike down the hall. He also said he would probably never marry, which is likely, and pronounced one of his words with a British accent because he's odd. I tried not to look at him much, nor Ryan because he seemed kind of sketchy at times, but I noticed that Mitchell has really nice porcelain-doll skin. The hallway argument culminated in a mini fistfight just before we left. Fuckin' weird.
On our way out, we ran across Physics Kid "Jack Black" Matt Pocius just beginning a nightly jog, who did some weird barrel roll, landing in a Charlie's Angels-esque kneeling finger-gun pose. He said it took him three years in Tibet to learn. Emily was delighted, made him repeat the antics, and photographed them with her huge camera (on which she likes to extend the zoom lens so it's more impressive). I explained that Matt is odd/violently bizarre, and Ryan said he's like everyone in their (small, private Quaker Philadelphia) high school rolled into one person.
They wanted to see the steam tunnels, but I told them no and went back to my empty room. I had even bought those fuckers chips and cookies. I didn't get to race them, and I don't know if anyone appreciated our community drawers.
In the morning, my roommate asked me where the baggers had gone (long time passing). I explained that they didn't love me and all, but not in those words. She laughed.
Emilybagger had wanted to come to my calc class to visit her ex-boyfriend who hates her, but never showed. Of all the baggers, she seems most likely to actually attend CMU (Emily2 being, as always, second), but none of them looked like a particularly good fit. Hell, one of the girls at Skibo (bleached-blonde Californian) looked jaded and wouldn't even talk to us despite wanting to major in CivE...
I hope my next baggers suck less.