Dry Clothes.

Everybody's heard of a cloudburst. Most of you have seen one, no doubt. And I'll bet some of you have been caught in the middle of one. Well, the other day, we here in Utah county got hit with something that was more of a cloud explosion. Gallons and gallons of rain pouring onto BYU campus... and guess who had to walk through all of it?

I was studying at one building and had to get to another for class - in ten minutes or less. That's the long and short of the matter. So I walked (not ran - walked) through the rain to the Fine Arts building - and at a fairly slow pace, thanks to the mountian of textbooks I was packing along in my shoulder back. The rain kept coming - if anything, it poured all the harder - and as an added bonus, BYU has a very poor drainage system on the brick paths, which results in puddles a foot deep. And so, between one thing and another, I arrived at my theatre classroom positively soaked. Dripping on the carpet. With Lake Superior hanging out in my shoes. And mermaid hair - bad mermaid hair. When I walked in the door of the Fine Arts building, a girl who was preparing to go out took one look at me, and froze. As I passed, I heard her mumble something like, "Oh my gosh..."

Fortunately, I wasn't the only one who came to theatre looking like that. But by the time I had sat around in my sopping jeans for an hour and ridden my bike home through a frigid wind... the fact that other theatre students showed up in dripping t-shirts was doing little to console my mood. I locked up my bike, went up to my apartment, peeled off my wet things and threw on a dry pair of sweats...

The effect was instantaneous. Goosebumps receeded, muscles relaxed, breathing slowed... it was comfort in its purest form. My whole outlook on the day was turned around in the space of ten seconds. Add a hot meal, a glass of milk, and an oreo... Magic? I should say so. You don't have to wave a wand to make contentment appear out of thin air. All it takes is dry clothes.