La Poisse

It all began last Friday at 4 AM in the morning. I woke up to the sound of security guys knocking at my door. At first I thought they were coming to inspect my room for drugs and alcohol but it turned out to be something else…totally different but just as equally upsetting. “Come in!” I yelled at whoever was knocking. One of the security guys let himself in and I couldn’t help it then but notice that his shoes were making some kind of a weird sound. I look on the floor but all I could see was the ceiling. Hein? How could that be? Maybe I was too sleepy. “Really am I this disoriented?” I thought to myself. It turned out that I was really looking at the reflection of the ceiling on the water that has flooded my room. First reaction was to reach underneath my bed and reach for the most precious thing I got…my laptop. Thank god it was still working despite the amounts of water it swallowed…those guys at IBM make good laptops. I will spare you the details of what happened next but in a nutshell I ended up spending the night as a refugee in some other building. The next day my room was all clean…very clean but also very smelly because of the wet carpet.

Then later on Friday I was trying to clean my glasses when all of a sudden they broke into two pieces. I stared at them thinking to myself that I was lucky to carry with my an extra pair.

Sunday I went to play some basketball, everything was going well until I tried to reach for that rebound when the ball slammed against my fingers making them look kind of funny. I didn’t think of it much then and continued playing. Another rebound and my second pair glasses, the last ones, fell and instantly broke into three pieces!!! That’s not good.

Monday I couldn’t see more than three feet ahead of me but I could really feel a pain in my right hand’s fingers. I tried to overlook it but it was just too much. By 2 PM I was in an ambulance going to Fes for some X-rays. The good thing is that I didn’t break anything the bad thing is that I sprained my fingers so bad that they would need at least three weeks to heal.

Today, as I was walking from downtown to campus, I sprained my ankle…Just as simple as that.

So in five days I found myself half-blind, handicapped (right hand and right foot), and with a smelly room from where I am writing these few lines.

And that’s the definition of la poisse if you are not a French speaker.