My girlfriend ate my homework

As a writer of some experience, I have the dubious distinction of having had to utter this very phrase.<br><br>•••<br><br>Context is required - I was in my final year of university, doing a four-year honors degree in Creative Writing. Most of the work in those courses is written, whether that’s creative, analytical, or a mix of the two. Poetry, prose, critical essays and book analyses - you name it. I worked hard, after some initial trouble in my first year, and had had a good run until finals.<br><br>I had the first day of my final exams on a Monday morning. I was doing well, had already finished a couple of the exams, and wasn’t too worried about the couple I was left with. On the morning of the last exam (and the hardest), I was in a good mood. Everything was going according to plan.<br><br>Until, about fifteen minutes before I had to leave for the exam, I realized that I had misplaced my notes. <br><br>This was nothing terribly worrisome, until I realized that I couldn’t find *any* of my notes, and the exam was in fifteen minutes. I began to panic, and so I did the only thing I could think of.<br><br>I called my girlfriend, and in a somewhat frantic voice, I asked her if she had seen my notes, because she had come over a couple of nights before and I thought I might have left them at her place. <br><br>She said, “no, I haven’t seen them. What’s wrong?”<br><br>And I said, “my exam is in fifteen minutes and I can’t find them!”<br><br>And then she said, “oh.”<br><br>And then I said, “what do you mean oh?”<br><br>And she said, “I thought you threw them away.”<br><br>And I said, “what do you mean you thought I threw them away?”<br><br>Because, well, up until that point, I was sure I hadn’t thrown them away. <br><br>She said, “didn’t you? I ate half of them.”<br><br>•••<br><br>I stared at the phone. I blinked a couple of times. <br><br>I said, “you…..you ate them?”<br><br>She said, “yeah.”<br><br>And well, then I panicked. I reacted very gracefully to this news, and I can be quoted as having said, “you *fucking idiot!*, how could you be so *stupid*? Do you know how important those were? I have an *exam* in fifteen minutes and you’ve eaten all my notes!”<br><br>And then she started crying, because I was being kind of a dick.<br><br>Because, well, she hadn’t actually eaten them maliciously. In fact, she had eaten them because she had mistaken them for a box of cookie wrappers.<br><br>•••<br><br>You see, I am a bit of an absent-minded person, and so I have a few constant habits that help me stay on track when I’m studying. One of those habits is eating cookies. I like cookies.<br><br>One of my other habits is writing notes in a big, bound notebook and then moving the relevant ones onto flashcards to study in a more efficient way. Which leaves a lot of paper scraps. <br><br>When I’m done with them, I put them in a cardboard box near the door so I don’t forget to throw them out. <br><br>On the morning of the last exam, I had been extremely lucky to have been able to find enough time to print off a couple of hundred pages of paper. That, combined with the stress of the exam and my utter mismanagement of time, led me to be in a state of extreme haste.<br><br>And so I had put the box in the freezer.<br><br>Yes. The freezer. Next to the cookies.<br><br>And so, when my girlfriend came over that night and saw the box, she had taken it out and eaten half of them. <br><br>•••<br><br>So I panicked. I freaked out. I told her off and called her stupid and I was mean about it because I had an exam in fifteen minutes and my notes were gone. <br><br>But, not to worry, I was fine because I had saved all the notes digitally, and so I figured I could just go to the library and print out a new set, right? Well, you know how it is when you’re up against the wire - one thing just seems to go wrong after the other. I spend the next ten minutes going to the library, but by the time I get there, they’ve closed, so I have to go to the other library, but by the time I get there, I’m out of time and the exam is about to start. <br><br>And then I remembered that the university had a Big Fancy Printer that was always available to students. So I ran to that printer, with the notes on my USB, just in time to see that it was locked into a maintenance mode because someone had tried to print out hundreds of dollars worth of money.<br><br>And well. I was fucked.<br><br>•••<br><br>As it happened, there was a librarian who was good friends with my older sister, and she saw me outside the printer room, ranting and raving about how I was going to fail and how it was all my fault and how my girlfriend was stupid.<br><br>And then she came over and she said, “well, why are you out here?”<br><br>And I said, “because my girlfriend ate my notes!”<br><br>And she shook the rafters with laughter, so hard that I had to help her to a chair so she didn’t fall.<br><br>She told me, “oh, poor baby. Well, maybe you can just use my printer.”<br><br>So I went to her office and she printed off all the notes I needed. I went to the exam, made it on time, and I got a B+.<br><br>I’d like to thank the many people who helped me during those hectic minutes - the librarian who printed the notes, my roommate who let me take his last five dollars to print them off, my boyfriend who came over to help me run around (just kidding, I didn’t have a boyfriend).<br><br>And to my girlfriend, who, because she ate my notes, saved me from getting a very bad mark on that exam, and allowed me to graduate university. Who put me in the center of one the funniest stories of my life and who makes it incredibly easy to be in love with her. <br><br>And to everybody who wants a boyfriend like her - I have good news for you. She’s single.