The other day (on Monday, to be exact), Omar was telling me something about how hazardous cell phones are, because they emit all kinds of weird radiation. Enough, he said, to pop a kernel of corn. So I did some research and found out that it’s actually a hoax because every article I found pertaining to a cell phone’s ability to pop corn debunked this theory. But whatever. My level of concentration was now hindered because I could no longer focus on Bayes’ Theorem and instead craved some delicious popcorn.
I went to sleep that night and found myself on a Greyhound bus in the middle of nowhere. I was getting a headache because everyone was talking on the phone, the bus driver was playing some shitty country music, and the scenery was too flat and agricultural for my liking. Plus, I was craving popcorn.
Then I got a brilliant idea. I walked to the front of the bus, pulled a gun out of my bag, and pointed it at the driver. “Just keep driving,” I told him. “All right, everybody listen up!” I shouted. “I need everyone to walk up to the front of the bus one-by-one and put their phone in this bag. And don’t try anything stupid, or I’ll kill us all!” I said, and released the safety. Immediately everyone hung up their phones and sure enough, one-by-one, starting from the front row, they did as they were told.
After I had everyone’s phone in my bag, I told the driver to pull over, which he did, and then I jumped out of the bus and ran into the field. A corn field. A big corn field.
I kept running until I suddenly found a huge flat patch, which was perfectly circular in a creepy, alien sort of way. I quickly deducted that I must be standing in the middle of a crop circle. An excellent starting point for phase one of my brilliant plan.
I sat down and emptied my bag of goodies. And since dreams do weird things, the bag which once contained about twenty phones now contained about two thousand. Sweet. I started lining them up around the edge of the circle, pointing them outwards, toward the unflattened corn. Once that was finished, I walked through the field until I reached the outer perimeter. I then started lining up the phones around the square of field, this time pointing them inwards, towards the corn. So for those of you who are imaginationally impaired and have no idea what I’m getting at, I basically did the same thing as selecting a circle in Photoshop and then clicking Select>Inverse. Get it? Good.
Once all my phones were in place, I went around setting alarms. They were all set to go off at exactly the same time. I started with the square perimeter and then did the circumference of the circle last, and when I finished, I had about five minutes to get the hell out of there. But where would I go?! I didn’t really think that part through. So I quickly made a little trench in the center of the circle, took cover, and waited.
Three… Two… One.
The explosion was like ten times more powerful than Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined. It was ridiiiiiiculous. Popcorn just started flying around everywhere! And you can calculate that if there are about four stalks per square meter, and each stalk has about five ears of corn, and each ear has about five hundred kernels, and I blew up about a hundred thousand square meters of field, that’s… (4 x 5 x 500, that’s 20 x 500, that’s 10,000 kernels per square meter, times 100,000, that’s…) holy shit, like 1,000,000,000 kernels of corn! A billion! Woah. Yeah so like I was saying, it was ridiculous.
As the corn started popping, however, I began suffocating. Because I was getting trapped under the weight of billion(s) of pieces of popcorn. So I had to almost swim my way through, in order to surface and be able to breathe normally. But the whole swimming thing didn’t really work, so I also had to actually eat my way through. Which at first was amazing, because my craving was finally satisfied. But I quickly became full, and desperately needed something to drink. Like movie theatre soda or something. Alas, I was in the middle of Nebraska or Oklahoma or something, so there was no movie theatre around. And the nearest well was probably all soaked up by now, because the popcorn was still popping.
Eventually I made my way to the top of all this craziness, and I could now kinda splash my way around. It was a similar feeling to playing in those huge vats of colourful, germ-ridden balls as a child. Only better.
As with most dreams, my fun had to end at some point. But instead of just waking up as I normally do, this dream took a horrible turn. In the distance, I saw a huge flying saucer flying at me at warp speed. It was honking and swerving and high-beaming me and everything. Those aliens were pissed. Like, really pissed. And if there’s one thing I know about aliens, it’s never to get them angry. Because they have laboratories and death rays and all kinds of other stuff to make your life hell.
So I quickly ducked down and started tunneling my way into the depths of the popcorn, trying to hide from the angry aliens. But their spaceship was equipped with lasers, ostensibly, and they could easily shoot through the delectable foaminess of the popcorn and kill me in no time.
Pew-pew! Pew! Pewpewpewpewpew! Pew! Pe-pew! I was under attack! No! And I couldn’t eat anymore effing popcorn because I was so full and dehydrated! What a horrible, horrible nightmare this dream had turned into. When I decided I had taken my last possible mouthful, I collapsed and feigned death, in the hopes that they would just leave. But, being aliens, they saw through my feeble plan and beamed me up regardless.
Once in their spaceship, they tied me up and I thought that was the end of me. They were definitely going to put me in a test tube or chop me up into bits or use me as a new source of fuel or something. Instead, they did worse: they lectured me. I absolutely HATE being lectured! Especially in alien jibberish. But there were subtitles (which I also hate), so I could understand the main jist of what they were saying which was that I had no right to vandalise their artwork just because I’m human and blah blah blah.
I couldn’t take it anymore. So I tried really hard to wake up. And sure enough, in the distance, I heard my alarm going off. This confused the aliens and made them lecture me even more. “Don’t think that just because your alarm is going off and you have to get up and get ready for school we’re going to let you get away that easily because you still have to pay for what you did and this this that and yadda yadda blahdiblah blah” (I stopped listening)… And then I woke up.
And the first thing I did was go downstairs to the kitchen, and down an entire bottle of water.
From the wonderful brain of Ona 