Sleepless in Lake Elsinore

I’ll get right to the point.

I enjoy sleeping rather late in the morning, but that is impossible to do at my house, which is where I was over Christmas. See, my brother Jeff, an avid sportsman, likes to sit in the living room and bounce a tennis ball off the wall that separates the living room from my bedroom. I don’t know if he does this because no one will play catch with him, but if that is the case, I do not blame them, especially if he hurls the ball when he plays catch with the same force that he uses when he hurls it at my wall. Were it not for the fact that Jeff is 6’1″ and weighs 240 pounds, I would undoubtedly give him a piece of my mind.

(You think I made up the part about Jeff’s size, but you are wrong.)

Then there was the night of December 30. On this night, my 10-year-old sister Joy had a slumber party, so all of her friends, as well as all of my 11-year-old sister Laura’s friends, came to spend the night. Notice I did not say that they came to sleep. If that was what they came to do, they failed miserably.

I went out with some friends for the evening and returned home at 2:00 a.m. to find all of the girls, along with the aforementioned enormous sportsman Jeff, asleep on the living room floor. I tiptoed past them, all 500 of them, and went into my room.

THEN I realized that my grandfather was staying with us for a few days, and while he normally sleeps on the couch, he obviously could not do that on this night, because even if he had wanted to, he probably could not have reached the couch, what with the 500 sleeping girls in the way, and so he was instead sleeping in my bed. Fortunately, I remembered this before getting into bed.

THEN I went to my sisters’ room, figuring I could sleep in one of their beds, but lo, I was mistaken. My sisters have a bunk bed, and they also have an incredibly large number of material possessions, such as dolls and toys and books, only instead of keeping these things in the closet, or at least on the floor, they apparently keep them on their beds, because both bunks were about six inches high with Barbies and New Kids on the Block action figures (“Pull Jordan’s string and hear his voice change!”). Furthermore, all their pillows and blankets were in the living room, being shared communally by the 500 sleeping girls, so their beds have been too cold to sleep in anyway.

THEN I went to Jeff’s room, figuring I could sleep there, since he was sleeping in the living room (presumably so he could wake up in the morning and immediately start work on his tennis ball-throwing activities). I climbed into his bed and went to sleep.

THEN, at 3 a.m., Jeff entered his room, woke me up, and instructed me to get out of his bed because he wanted to sleep in it. I told him that I thought he was sleeping in the living room, because when I came home, a) he was sleeping in the living room, and b) he had a sleeping bag and pillow there, too, suggesting that he had not merely fallen asleep there by mistake, but had carefully planned it out. I guess as a journalist, I should avoid jumping to such hasty conclusions. He informed me that neither he nor any of the girls had slept yet but had instead been pretending to sleep when I came home so as to play a little joke on me. Ha-ha! was my hearty response upon learning of this.

THEN Jeff threatened to forcibly remove me from his bed, and I had no doubts as to his capability of doing this.

THEN I went into the living room, where all 500 girls were studiously engaged in giggling, and I hissed some vague threats at them.

THEN I found a pillow and blanket and went into my parents’ room to sleep on their floor. I mainly slept there, as opposed to some other floor in the house, simply to make my parents feel guilty for not providing me, their first-born son, with adequate sleeping quarters upon my triumphant return home after a glorious first semester in college. They expressed their guilt by continuing to snore loudly.

THEN I got revenge the next night by hosting a New Year’s Eve party.

(Eric D. Snider is a freshman at BYU, originally from Lake Elsinore, Calif. He is currently living in Deseret Towers, where he almost always has his own bed.)