appeals for wheels

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So, I'm pretty sure I'm suffering from a herniated disc or some other horribly morbid back condition after living through these last two weeks of school. Without exaggeration, I suspect that I carry about 30% - 40% of my body weight in my backpack in the form of textbooks. 

Yesterday, I was walking to my car and I actually felt delirious from the tingling sensations in my vertebrae. Objectively speaking, I don't think this situation qualifies under the accredited guidelines for backpack safety. 

Except, the problem at hand here is neither the pain nor the associated health risks of carrying around too much weight. Osteoporosis does not scare me as much as the alarming ideas that have recently been surfacing in my head as a result of all this delirious pain. 

You see, these past few days I've found myself wondering what it would be like to carry a rolley backpack... and for a moment or two, these thoughts fill my mind (and soothe my back) with blissfully alleviating images. But when I begin to think of the reality of actually carrying one around, other images begin to precipitate. 

Images of 

• my wheels falling off and having to pick the thing up, wrap my arms around it and walk it all over campus
  
• people pointing and laughing, especially friends and family
  
• the compelling need to explain myself (and more specifically, the ownership of my rolley backpack) to anyone who will listen
• not holding on tight enough and watching it roll down a hill 
  
• realizing my rolley backpack is strikingly similar to that of the librarian's 
  
• not being able to fit in a bathroom stall with it
  
• carrying the germs from the bathroom stall to all subsequent destinations 
• the grave implications of a faulty zipper
• attracting attention to myself from the noise of the wheels streaking across the floor 
• freaking people out from the gradually increasing sounds of my wheels getting closer and louder from behind 
• being interviewed by the school paper on my rolley backpack lifestyle 
• leaving various-colored wheel traces behind me, everywhere i go 
• feeling the need to appropriately accessorise my rolley backpack with a helmet
• accidentally nicking people's ankles with my wheels
• accidentally nicking my own ankles, and having my rolley backpack watch me roll down a hill

 

This list could very easily go on forever. The bottom line is, first a rolley backpack, and then what? A fanny pack. That's what. I'm not rolling down that road. I've got to come up with something before Monday morning or else I'm going to have to ask campus health services for some morphine. 

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Dedicated to: all the times during elementary school when I use to fling my 12 oz. backpack onto one shoulder, mimicking the strides of Stephanie Tanner and Kimmy Gibbler.

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