Monday, April 17, 2017

Muffin in the Sky

This is the legend of Muffin.

It's not a long story, but it is a strange one.

The week my roommates and I moved into 1217, the week before classes started last semester, we received a gift from a girls' apartment in an adjacent building. It was a plate of six banana muffins, one for each of us. Five of us ate one, but Carson did not. We don't know why he didn't eat it; he claims to this day it didn't occur to him that it was his, but we aren't here to speculate. The point is, the muffin sat uneaten on the counter for two weeks.

When we checked on it to see if it had gone bad, we discovered the muffin had become extremely hard, like a cinder block. We showed it to Carson to see what he had done (jokingly, of course), and in so doing we saw fit to smack him with the muffin. When we did, I swear the thing made a resonating sound like a bell. and it bounced down to the table unharmed.

After observing its peculiar stability, the rest of us saw fit to do something more fun with the muffin. Three of us, along with a friend from another dorm, suspended the muffin from a small hook on the ceiling in the center of the living room, directly above a tipped-over chair and a note reading "Carson, you left me alone for two weeks. Why couldn't you let me die?"
Muffin's current state

We had a good laugh over that, and we thought that might be the end of the story, but there was more to come. We put the chair back at the table and disposed of the note, but the muffin stayed there, hanging from its scotch tape noose. After a couple more weeks, that wasn't good enough for us anymore, so I updated the suspension to a single sewing thread, which is nearly invisible in certain lighting and allows the muffin to turn lazily with the air currents.



Since it is now April, Muffin has been hanging there for eight months. Yes, eight months. He is still as hard as stone and shows no signs of decay, so we've endeavored to leave him there, declaring him our seventh roommate. I'm not sure if that's a greater testament to Muffin's wondrous qualities or our own unsurpassed weirdness, so I'll let you judge. In the meantime, we've been discussing strategies to preserve Muffin's legacy, appointing me to keep him safe and perhaps someday cast him in an acrylic block to keep for posterity. I suppose, in the end, diamonds are not forever. Muffins are forever.

Hic Manebimus Optime!

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