How Not To Get Murdered At Brown University

I think someone might be trying to kill me.One day, I returned to my dorm to see an gaping void upon my door — a void upon which my nametag, which was carefully crafted for me by my RPLs, had once rested. Ah, geez, that’s a bummer, I thought, assuming that gravity had finally bested the strength of the painters tape securing my identity-confirming Incredibles-paper-cutout to the door. So I continued on with my day, oblivious to the depravity that had truly taken it down — at least, that is, until I reached the bottom of the staircase.I saw the evidence as soon as I had made it down the four flights below the scene of the kidnapping: the mangled wreckage of my nametag. Scraps of orange, black, and red led, like sadistic breadcrumbs, to the festering corpse, which had been dropped all the way down into the basement.This felt a little too targeted for my liking. Taking a nametag is one thing, but taking it down four flights of stairs and then tearing it up into little pieces? Little suspicious. Little too on the nose. As everyone’s podcast-loving aunt told them before coming to Brown, Providence was once a “super, and I mean like crazy, big hub for those Mafia men.” This door-badge butchery is the modern-day equivalent of someone putting a dead fish on my doorstep.And so, to make a long story short, someone is trying to kill me. In all of my years of watching crime shows and reading Nancy Drew, I never imagined that I’d be on this side of the narrative. But, for the time being, I’m still kicking. For anyone else that’s either already on someone’s list or doesn’t want to wind up on one, here are a couple pieces of advice that I wish I had earlier.  

• Don’t get sick. There was about a two-week (okay, like two-month) period in which my body started shutting down from an inundation of weird college diseases, and, in this process, produced an obnoxious quantity of sneezes, coughs, and other weird illness noises. Sniffling and other mucus-moving processes are not used in ASMR videos for a reason. That reason? Because these sounds make people want to kill you. Yikes.

• Get better at door etiquette. A classic murderable faux-paus, holding the door for people is a tricky skill to nail. In short, don’t hold it for people too far away to rationalize holding the door for them, but also don’t not hold the door for people close enough to warrant a door hold. If you get nervous and aren’t sure what to do, go in through a window.

• Don’t compost tea bag wrappers. If you’re in the Ratty and drink a tea, whatever you do, do not compost the tin foil Bigelow wrapper that comes with it. They do not compost. You’re literally begging for someone from SCRAP to scrap you.

• Don’t get sick (cont.). People also don’t like to be sick themselves, and if you’re the vector that got them sick, then you’re practically begging to wake up with a horse head in your bed (it’s a Mafia thing. Providence, am I right?).

• Don’t start any sentences with “actually.” It’s annoying.

• Don’t argue with the intramural referees. If we’re talking about hit lists, I can almost guarantee that the intramural referees have a running one for every person that has thrown up their arms in a sports game, huffed a little too loudly after getting called for a foul, or had the ever loving audacity to actually say something to the ref.

• Don’t spend too much time feeling up the fruits in the dining halls. Everyone wants to eat the best fruit possible, but it’s a little unreasonable to spend more than thirty seconds trying to pick between two nearly-identical oranges. Lines form, people get antsy, and ultimately you’re just going to pick the one that is secretly harboring seeds anyway. Be efficient when choosing your fruits!

• Don’t ride an electric scooter through Faunce when it’s super busy and there are so many bodies that you can only go a mile an hour making the whole ordeal seem really futile and annoying. It’s annoying.

• Call your mom. Regardless of how far away your Mom lives, she has the ability to really mess you up. Hiring a hitman isn’t beneath a Mom that hasn’t heard from their kid in over a week. Stay safe and dial her up!

  Tread lightly and good luck!Images via and Deborah Marini.