Alien served over easy

Last Thursday, my morning class was cancelled – therefore, I had time to eat breakfast for the first time since the semester started. Naturally, I was thrilled. I got up in the morning, brushed my teeth, washed my face and cheerfully cooked myself an egg. Being so skillful and all, I kept the yolk round and unbroken in the center of the egg – like a yellow pus-filled blister growing out of the egg white. The fact that I had cooked a beautiful egg made me really happy, and I couldn’t stop myself from admiring my breakfast before I ate it. I brought the egg back to my room, put the pan on my desk and turned away to put on my glasses. I turned back to my desk to continue looking at my egg, and was surprised by the appearance of a little black spot on the egg. Even more surprisingly, when I looked closer, I discovered the black spot was a microscopic spaceship! A tiny UFO landed in my breakfast! I held my breath. A little green man climbed out of the spaceship. He was half a centimeter tall and had a face that looked like the mermaid’s from the Starbucks trademark. He looked lost. I was very excited by the extraterrestrial experience happening on my breakfast egg. I figured that if I ever landed on anyone’s egg, I’d be disoriented myself and appreciate some directions. So I tried to initiate a conversation. I am multi-lingual, but still, facing an alien in my breakfast, I found myself speechless. After much thought, I decided to talk to him in Chinese. “Ni hao!” I said. The alien looked confused. English was my second shot. “Hello!” I said, to the egg. The little green dude still looked lost. “Hola!” I said, but it didn’t work either. After two hours of trying every language I know, and looking up greetings in rare languages online, I still couldn’t communicate to the alien on my breakfast. Meanwhile, the alien had taken out a microscopic pile of construction material and started building himself a miniature shelter. Communication was a necessity – I had to warn him not to poke anything into the ground, otherwise known as my breakfast. So I kept trying and trying. I finally found out that the alien could understand me when I spoke in English with my nose stuffed. I properly stuffed my nose with rolled-up Kleenex and spoke to the alien. We greeted each other, and then I made the warning. “Don’t poke the ground – it will break,” I said lightly, so that I didn’t blow him away. He stopped the construction and turned to me and said, “I know, I used to live on a real blister. I know this is a breakfast egg – I’ve been on your universe for quite a while now.” I became very interested – I mean really, this is better than the X-Files. I get an experienced alien right in front of me, and he’s neither threatening nor bleeding green Jell-O. “Are you on a quest?” I asked. The alien became very serious and told me that he was looking for his true love. The look on his face was so painfully determined I decided to be a nice person and help out. I haven’t had much experience with this whole true love business myself, but I have watched many soap operas, and figured that there might be some good advice for him on TV. So I took the entire pan with me to Danforth – of course, people were looking at me funny, but hey, I was helping out someone on a quest for true love. It was important that the alien in my breakfast could seek important advice from the TV in the dining hall. Yet things just wouldn’t work the way I planned. The moment I walked into Danforth, the alien on my breakfast got very excited. He jumped up and down so much that had the egg yolk not dried up yet, it would have broke and the little dude would drown in egg yolk. I secretly re-stuffed my nose with napkins and asked him what was wrong. He told me that he has just saw his true love in a fruit basket on our way in! I also got very excited, so I took the alien-containing pan to every full fruit basket and went through every piece of fruit so that the alien could identify his true love. After going through 25 apples, 30 pears, and starting on the 17th grapefruit, the alien dude squeaked in ecstasy and shrieked that the seventeenth grapefruit is his destiny. He made a big effort to hug the grapefruit and wouldn’t let me eat it. Having forgone lunch and generously given my breakfast away to an alien, I was starving to death. The idea that I had picked out a grapefruit and couldn’t eat it made me very angry with the alien, so I told him that if the grapefruit weren’t frozen, his true love would start rotting in a few days. And, with his consent, I snuck both the alien and his grapefruit into one of the big kitchen freezers. Then I proceeded to eat my dinner. Wang can be reached at ewang@campustimes.org.