Lint

When I was a kid, me and my best friend Lauren were always doing something. We were inseparable. When one of us had an idea, we almost always executed it without hesitation. Sometimes they were creative things like painting, or building our own go-kart. But sometimes they were...not so smart things. Like seeing who could fit the most cheese puffs in their mouth.

(I managed to get over thirty, but only because they started to dissolve after a while, which made room for more.)

Another time we thought it was a grand idea to see who could drink the most water.

We both drank around 12 cups, which resulted in me almost wetting my pants at a theme park. I ended up peeing in a bush underneath a roller coaster because the bathroom line was too long. That's a whole different story, and I'll probably blog about it sometime.

Sometimes (a lot of the time) the ideas were born out of boredom. One day we were looking in her pantry and we discovered a bunch of bags of instant potatoes.

We had no idea that adding water to a strange powder would magically turn into potatoes, and in our excitement we quickly decided to fill some of the drinking fountains at the park with them.

Our most brilliant idea came one day when we were pestering a certain boy who sat in front of us in class. We would dig in our pockets and find pocket lint to mash into little balls. Then we'd throw it at the back of his head, where it usually got stuck in his hair. It never got old for us. For him, yes. It got very, very old. He probably still harbors an inexplicable hatred for us to this day.

But once he stopped reacting to it, we knew we needed to step it up. It didn't seem like there was enough lint in the world to throw at him.

The more we thought about it, the more it sounded like the best idea we'd ever had.

We soon discovered while reading the Guinness Book of World Records that there were no records relating to lint.

That's when lint became the MOST IMPORTANT THING IN OUR LIVES.

We bombarded our mothers when they did the laundry, begging them to give us the lint.

It was obviously against their better judgement, but it made us so happy. Sometimes I wonder what they were thinking when they would hand us the wads of dryer lint they saved at our request.

They probably hoped that we'd turn out alright in the end. (We both did, I think. At least Lauren did. I'm still in school and I live in my parent's basement, so you decide. But at least I don't collect lint anymore, right? ...Right?) Most little girls liked collecting other things, like Barbies.

We weren't really able to get very much lint at first. It took a few months of collecting our own dryer lint to realize that we needed to step it up. One day we were talking to one of our good friends at recess. We told her our ambitions and dreams of becoming the first people in the world to have a giant lint collection in the Book of World Records.

The next day, she showed up with a bag of dryer lint for us. We were ecstatic.

It was then that we decided to take complete advantage of people's willingness to contribute their dryer lint to our cause. That same day we made an announcement in our classroom asking for lint donations.

But it went from taking our own lint and the lint of friends and classmates to going and collecting it from the local laundromats.

We were always so excited to go to the laundromats to get the lint. It was like a beautiful Lint Christmas. We'd bounce in and ask the attendant if he could empty out the dryers of the lint so we could take it home. I don't remember his reaction, but he was probably really confused, and maybe a little bit scared.

I feel bad for the guy! This is one of those memories...that when I think about, I shudder a little bit.

Lint was a beautiful thing to us. To everybody else, it looked like this:

And to us:

We outdid ourselves though, when we were able to get the lint collection onto the school's morning announcement. At the time, we weren't even worried if everyone though we were strange.

In fact, we were convinced that everybody thought we were the shi. We beamed with pride when the announcements came on and directed everybody to bring their lint to our classroom.

Surprisingly, people did. The next day someone from the office delivered a box of lint to our classroom that someone had left for us.

We even attempted to make a website explaining our cause. Here's a screenshot of the sadly apologetic explanation, riddled with spelling errors.

Don't even ask me who Tiddles and Knotsy were, because I don't know. But I'm sure they were important to the Lint somehow. Maybe they were the lint?

Within a few weeks we had gotten about 3 garbage bags of lint from various sources.

We had set up a booth outside so passing cars could donate their lint if they wanted. We left it out there over night, bags open for easier access. 

But then...disaster struck. It struck in the form of a rainstorm during the night, leaving our beloved lint a sopping mess. Our own hopes and dreams were left there with that lint, soaking and nasty for the garbageman to pick up the next day.

It was the absolute worst. All those months of asking people for lint and scrounging for it in our own pockets and dryers was all for naught...





We got over it pretty fast though.

We ended up with a lot of snails.