Once, I went to spend the night over at one of my best friend's house (Not Vamps! Though I have stories from those sleepovers too!). I had been to her house before, and had always had a good time. Little did I expect that the night would turn out to be one of the worst experiences that every happened to me while I was wearing pajamas.
We had done plenty of fun things earlier- she has a pool, so her house is pretty much heaven. But it was late and we were ready to go inside. Another thing that (usually) makes her house heaven is the fact that her TV has On Demand.
We decided to hang out on her couch and watch The Proposal in her downstairs living room (which, since she is the only member of her family with a downstairs room, is basically just a second bedroom for her. (Jealous yet? They also have regular bonfires, every video game invented, and a keurig!)
My friend is terrible at staying up late (Which is more of a curse for her friends than her) and fell asleep about halfway through the movie, roughly around midnight. I didn't really mind, I figured I would just finish the movie and then go to bed on my end of the couch, which is huge and blue, and I assumed would leave us both plenty of room.
I was wrong.
After the movie (which I thoroughly enjoyed) ended, I curled up on the two enormous pillows that were on my side of the couch and shut my eyes. This was when disaster struck.
It was a bit too early for me to fall easily to sleep, and after maybe a half and hour or so of lying there I was finally getting drowsy, and ready to fall asleep. Then, a foot made contact with my face. In her sleep, my friend had turned sideways so that she was lying completely across the couch. And, her couch is large, but it's not one of those huge L-shapes ones that three people can lie on at once (I am proud to say that I have one of those). Her couch, was not large enough for 1.5 people to lay on. (Her being the full person, me being the half since I was still in a sitting position).
I did my best to uncomfortably inch away from her foot and curl up further in my corner. This worked for about five minutes, when her foot ended up kicking my face again. So I pulled a pillow off the couch and moved over even more. By this point, I thought I was far enough to give her enough foot-range and me enough room to fall asleep. This was not the case.
Both feet got involved, kicking and moving and getting in my face no matter how hard I tried to evade them. Both pillows were off the couch by this point and I was simply laying against the hard frame. By now, it was almost 2:00 A.M I was miserable. It was the worst. I just wanted to fall asleep and in the morning I figured everything would be okay. Unfortunately, falling asleep was difficult.
Then I got an idea. Since she, in all her moving, had ended up pushing both of her pillows off the couch, and I had pushed both of mine off the couch, I had access to all pillows and the floor.
I pulled the four pillows together into one giant super-pillow, and curled up in the fetal position on them. Since they were such big pillows, I was both several inches off the ground and I was even kind of comfy. I shut my eyes and thought that, all was well.
But then, the On Demand channel, which had been silent while it waited for further command after its movie ended, switched back to the channel we were watching before The Proposal. That channel, regrettably, was cartoon network. And on cartoon network, they were playing the most obnoxious shoes, which were all set on obnoxious volumes. I spent an entire episode of the Boondocks trying desperately and unsuccessfully to fall asleep through all the noise. I spent half an episode of The Oblongs, first looking for a way to kill myself to end the torture that is Adult Swim, and the second half realizing that maybe I could change the channel and wondering how I would get the remote.
The last I had seen of it, my friend had been using it to order the movie. Now, as I looked at her, sprawled across the couch with a blanket half on her and half on the floor, I had absolutely no clue what had happened to it.
I decided that maybe I would just have to suffer, and maybe I would just fall asleep, because I didn't want to go poking around my friend who gets very upset about being woken up. But, when the next stupid Cartoon Network show came on, I knew I had to find the damn remote.
So I spent time carefully crawling across the floor, and ever-so gently pushing around the blanket so as not to disturb her. Finally, I found the remote, wedged just between the bottom of the couch and the carpet. Thanking God for his mercy, I raised the remote to my hands and hit a button that looked like it would turn off the TV.
The TV stayed on. Cartoon Network continued torturing me.
I hit the button again. And then I hit the channel button. Then the volume button.
And that was when I realized that the remote was missing something.
Batteries.
WHAT THE HELL? I was thinking, as I crawled back under the couch to look for the batteries. There was no back on the remote, so it made sense if they had fallen out. After all, this was the remote she had been using, hadn't it? But alas, there were no batteries to be found.
Broken, I clambered back to my pillow island and went into my fetal position, kind of wanting to cry (though the extra emotion definitely came from the fact that it was about four a.m. now, and I was really getting tired.) I tried to sleep again. No such luck. I needed quiet. Or at least something other than a television screaming profanities at top volume.
Then, I got the fabulous idea to check the TV. Most TV's have volume adjusters on them, right? I could turn it down and then the television would have to mouth profanities, that I wouldn't be able to hear and would therefore be able to sleep through. Oh, it was perfect!
Until the TV failed to have a volume adjuster on it.
I was really downhearted now, so tired I could barely move and so completely irritated by the television that I could never sleep. And just as I lost all hope of this sleepover ever being at the very least, a mediocre memory, I noticed, tucked between the TV and the cabinet, a second remote.
I paused. My eyes widened. Could it be? Or was life just playing a trick on me again? Getting me excited about the remote, just so that it could rip my heart in half again when the remote had no backing and no batteries.
Cautiously, I lifted the remote and turned it over in my hands. It had no backing either, but it did have batteries inside! I spent a quick second trying to process how my friend's remote had ended up on the cabinet across the room, when as far as I knew she had never gotten up from the couch, but it was about five a.m. and thinking was an impossible feat.
I tried to turn off the TV, but I found that the button labeled "TV" was just one of those trick buttons that doesn't do anything at all. As far the other white, unlabeled buttons, I was to scared of breaking anything to try them (I have been known to break most and all things I touch) so I just turned the volume down as much as I could (For some unfathomable reason I couldn't get the damn thing to mute!)
I then, feeling better than I had all night, lay on my island pillows and prayed for sleep to come.
But sleep didn't come, and guess why?
Adult Swim was so obnoxiously loud and irritating, that even on low volume I couldn't sleep near it's existence. So once more, I picked up the remote and tried changing the channel.
Miraculously, that actually worked!
Unforunately, I don't know Comcast channels, and I didn't have a good, quiet channel number to go to. So I settled on flipping through the channels until I finally found a nice, boring documentary around 6 a.m.
And finally, finally, I managed to fall asleep as I listened to the drone voice of an old man discussing astronomy or something that I didn't care to learn about.
And in the morning, my friend asked me why I slept on the floor.
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