So, I know I should catch everyone up my life here at Reed, but right now I only have the patience to relate one particular story. Here goes:

This morning, I was stretching to reach my clothes, dangling over the piles o' stuff in my room, when I looked down to see what I was straining to reach over. I realized that it was a large graffitied cooler with an overstuffed backpack on top. It was not mine. Although several people spent the night in our room last night, mainly because I'm a dork and didn't have the energy to really kick them out, I didn't think it was any of theirs, either. So I called Lizard over and we looked into the smallest compartment of the backpack.

In that compartment, we found a restraining order against Lance Losher, as well as an "inmate request form" from Welks County jail in Colorado. We also found a list of phone numbers, labeled with some familiar names of people in our dorm--Cody, Jesse, and a couple of other names I couldn't remember. I figured then that someone on the hall knew him and he had put his stuff in the wrong room. This is not particularly disturbing, because he wouldn't have had to break in--Lizard and I regularly leave our door propped open when we go down the hall to the social room, just to keep air flowing through and such--so Lizard and I moved the stuff into the hallway and went off to commons to eat and ask Cody & co. if they knew him.

At commons, we found Cody and asked him if he knew Lance. He said he didn't, and suggested that we run his name through the Reed email directory to see if he's a student, and that we ask around the building. So, we went back to the dorm to check out the blitzmail directory. There are neither Lances nor Loshers in the directory. So we asked around, and nobody knew him. Finally we called Community Safety and asked them to come over about the stuff.

Going through the stuff (partially to make sure there weren't any bombs in it, partially out of the glee born of unrestrained voyeurism), we discovered that he was in jail in Colorado at least up until this past Tuesday. We discovered that he was put in jail on the second of September, for fighting in the parking lot of a store, refusing to leave the premises when asked, and "wilfully damaging the real property of the Frederick Police Department by repeatedly slamming his head into the hood of the patrol car." He requested medication for "psycological [sic] and some medical problems" while in jail on the 4th of September and was not granted his request until the tenth.In his bag were a crystal of some sort, tabasco sauce, toiletries, clothes, and a large, poor-quality knife. In his cooler was a t-shirt and a panhandling sign: on one side, printed with the American flag, it said, "With your help I can get beer and become God," and on the other it said, "Spare any GOD--I mean $$?"

The CSOs finally came and talked to us and took the stuff away to lost-and-found. In the meantime we had become quite a large group sitting around the stuff in the hallway, getting our fingerprints all over it and messing it up. And the adventure was over, although the mystery has not been solved....

Lance, who are you? Why are you here? Why did you slam your head repeatedly into the hood of a Frederick patrol car? And why the hell did you leave your stuff in my room?

-Jenn-