In my country, a lab-partnership is a sacred trust.

This weekend I almost caught my apartment on fire with my pants.
This is much more exciting sounding than it is actually exciting; however, I think that when the words pants and fire are involved, there is explaining to be done.
There I was dusting my apartment Saturday evening as I brushed past a dresser, upon which was a lit oil warmer and a few lit candles, a knob (I just wrote knob!!) caught in one of those irritatingly stylish holes with which jeans are festooned these days. The jeans tore both horizontally and vertically as I scrambled to both grab candles and keep the dresser upright.

In terms of fire related injuries, this is not my most humiliating. In junior high I was lab-partnered with a gentleman named Brandon. Brandon was generally incompetent, but this didn’t matter as I was only interested in my perfectly formed side-swept bangs. Well, it didn’t matter until one day when Brandon left our lab-station seeking me for help lighting our Bunson burner. Irritated, I stormed back to our station and I said, “You just squeeze the sparker,” and with that I struck the sparker and an enormous ball of flame erupted from my hand. Brandon had left the gas on for several minutes as he tried to light the burner with his inarticulate man-boy paws. My perfectly sculpted bangs and parts of my arm hair and eyebrows went up in a poof of foul smelling smoke which combined with the odors of our burning notebooks and textbooks tripping the fire alarm. Our young teacher ran forth with a fire blanket and as she saved us all from baking to death in our cinderblock building I touched the crinkled remains of my hair and it fell like dead leaves.