Something this good's gotta be Home Grown

This morning I woke up late, happy to see the sun shining brightly into my bedroom. I took a deep breath, moaned at the morning, and raised my arms above my head to stretch and yawn and get that nice morning-snuggle feeling. I turned my sleepy bed-head to the right to look out the window, when BAM! I was hit in the face with the most foul smelling stench I had ever smelled.

And it was coming from my armpit.

Now, I have been known, on more than one occasion, to have incredibly stank armpits (but I wear deodorant now so shut up about it already). But this, this smell, this horrible, deathly, rank smell, was like no other smell my body has ever emitted. I can proudly say.

I placed the smell immediately - it is the exact smell of the hotel room I was in last night with 25 college students from New Jersey (shit that foul has got to be imported! They don't call our state the Armpit Of America for nothing).

How, you may ask, did I end up in a hotel room with 25 college students from New Jersey drinking cranberry "drink" (not juice, but "drink) with coconut flavored rum (yes, it was as gross as it sounds) and eating Cheez-its? One word: A cappella (ok, it's actually two words, but it sounds like one. By the way, have you noticed how many parenthesis I've used in this paragraph?).

Kenny's a cappella group from Rutgers (Causal Harmony) was performing in a competition at Cornell. Yes, a cappella is potentially the dorkiest thing ever, but with some Jersey attitude it is the fucking bomb. These guys rock my world. I instantly feel cool being around them, except that I act like a complete dork because they're so cool and I'm such a dork (of course, they're dorks too - I mean, it is still a cappella - but they're such cool dorks that it's intimidating). I clap and smile and get giddy like a little girl when they perform. I have crushes on half the members (and then meet them and realize they're 5'5'' and 19 years old), and am so taken by their charm and style that I get completely wrapped up in the emotion of their performance so much so that I usually have to take off a layer of clothing because I'm getting so excited. I'm not kidding.

Casual Harmony rocked the freaking house and won first place in the competition, along with 3 or 4 other awards like best choreography, best vocal percussion and best arrangement. The other 5 groups were pissed - but we were too busy yelling and screaming and dancing NEW JERSEY! NEW JERSEY! OHHHH! OOOOHHH! To really notice.

Afterwards we headed back to their hotel to partay (yes I spelled it that way on purpose) because that's what you do when you win. Or lose.

So we're hanging out and drinking crappy liquor and lite beer, being loud, screaming, telling bad jokes and in general having a good ol' time. Around 2am some of the boys decide they're hungry and want to make a trip to Wegmans, the ridiculously large 24-hour supermarket that college students go to when they are drunk or high just for the sake of going there when they're drunk or high. Naturally, we did the same.

6 of us crammed into a 5 person vehicle and made the trip down the street. Once in the store we all wandered aimlessly, picking up random snacks like pie crusts (I'm not kidding), lighter fluid (he was really drunk), pop tarts (the standard) and Chex Mix (that was Kenny's choice; always the practical one). Where else would you get to hear someone say "Dave, stop putting your face on everything!" than wandering through a grocery store at 2am with drunk college boys? It's so stereotypically wonderful that I couldn't help but revel in it.

We check out, cram back into the car, and go back to the hotel. We start getting close to the room and smell something a little......off. We open the door to the room and are smacked IN THE FACE with the exact smell that was in my armpit this morning. We had sat in that room for 4 hours and not noticed how bad it smelled until we got a whiff of the outside world.

We stood outside the room, literally gasping, laughing hysterically, and covering our noses while yelling "How is anyone even alive in there?! Oh my god! Get-out-of-the-room!" because the smell was that bad.

Hence, we have returned to the beginning of the story, where I wake up with a stinky armpit (I keep saying "armpit," singular, because the other one doesn't smell for reasons I'm sure I'll never know), as a result of hanging out with stinky college boys from New Jersey and drinking lite beer until 3am. Do I mind? Of course not - I had more fun than I've had in a while. But I can't help but think: I hung out with cute, witty, multi-ethnic boys from New Jersey and all I got was this stinky armpit.