Monkey-Business

Way back when I had first started university (community college) I was in a bit of a funk. I didn't have too many friends, there weren't too many people going to my school that I knew, and I knew pretty much no one in my actual classes. So when I finally managed to win the attention of one of the women in my class, it was an...exciting moment. What made it even better is that there was no effort required on my part to catch her eye, a feat yet to be repeated.

Quinn was a few years older than I, and, even though she was very pretty, I didn't take much notice of her when we first started our class. We were a few weeks into the semester before Quinn started sitting beside me. She had just started a new job, and her shift would finish with only enough time for her to get to class, so she most often arrived a few minutes late. Due to her tardiness, she would find herself without a seat, and would have to seat next to me because of the empty chair I constantly found situated to my right.

There was a particularly dull video being shown during our anthropology class one day, and it was a struggle to stay conscious through it. I wasn't the only one dozing off, so I figured I would try to stimulate my mind enough that, should our professor ask us any questions about what we had watched, I would at least be able to pretend that I was paying attention. My method of staying awake was doodling, so I opened my textbook to a page relevant to the video (something about bonobo chimpanzees) and started sketching one of the pictures into my notebook.

I was able to recreate the chimp's picture fairly accurately, focusing on it so intently that I wasn't really aware of my surroundings, and, when I noticed that the chimp's expression was likely close to my own (insanely bored) I drew a little speech bubble over its head and wrote something along the lines of: "my mind is so numb it's drooling out my ears." Hilariously eloquent, yes?

It was as I finished writing the caption that I got a shot in the shoulder, and I turned to see Quinn giving me a thumbs-up. She leaned over to me and whispered "that's really good! Do you want some pencil crayons to colour it in?" This was the first time that she and I had had any interaction, despite her sitting beside me for the last few classes, but from that point on she was talking to me so much that it was as though we had bonded several weeks ago.

From then on, our activities in class became far more boisterous, and we went from being the quietest pair in the class to the loudest. Before I had drawn that picture, Quinn and I generally avoided any questions that the teacher asked in class, if there was anything that called for audience participation, we would both sink lower into our chairs, but once we had come together, we both started offering our opinions far more in class, because we both knew that, no matter what we said, no matter how stupid or smart, the other would make a related quip that would send the first into a fit of laughter and disrupt the class for the next few minutes. The class itself wasn't boring, the material was extremely interesting, it was just that our professor droned on monotonously, so Quinn and I needed to create our own fun during class.

A few weeks after Quinn and I had started interacting with one another, there was a small project we needed to do for class involving plotting out a map of one of the rooms in our homes and drawing it out. Naturally, this was really exciting for Quinn, as she "love[d] drawing, and [she] wanted to be a painter when [she] was younger!"

My map was an overhead view of my bedroom, and I didn't put very much effort into it because it was, essentially, worth only a participation mark. I usually got to the college about an hour before my class started, and would go and sit in the library and read until I needed to go to class. On this particular day, Quinn had arrived even earlier in an effort to finish off her map with pencil crayons. Quinn spotted me as I walked into the library and waved me over, showing me her map and asking to see mine. Hers was elaborate, each wall was on its own piece of paper, as was the floor, and she had taped it together so that it stood on its own as a diorama of her living room.

When she saw mine, she asked "whoa, you better finish it fast, class starts soon!" which is what convinced me that, maybe, I needed to add some colour to it, as, apparently, it wasn't all that impressive in black and white.

We were forced to leave the library because we were growing ever-more rowdy the more we coloured; we probably should have been using crayons because it seemed that, when we were both given colouring utensils, we devolved into the mentality of our kindergarten selves.

When we got to class, we were supposed to hand our maps into the teacher, who would then place them around the class at random, and we were to wander the room trying to guess whether the room belonged to a man or a woman. Some cases were easier than others: the purple bedroom filled with stuffed animals, pillows, and shoes was owned by a young woman. The bathroom that was rather non-descript aside from the athlete's foot powder sitting on the counter belonged to a man.

What I loved about Quinn is that, as she walked around the room looking at what everyone else did, she voiced her shock, in increasing volume, that our classmates put such little effort into their projects. It's not that she was tactless, it's just that she expected everyone else to be as into the work as she was.

It should have been a good indication that she would be really intense when we would start our group project for the end of term. But who else was I going to work with?