Natalie RandallFollow

Date Collected

Fall 11-14-2017

Place item was collected

Logan, Utah in the informant's apartment

Informant

Draper Ollis

Point of Discovery/Informant Bio

Draper is 21 years old and tends to act more like a twelve year old or a 65 year old. There’s not much inbetween. He’s currently studying outdoor product design at Utah State University, but he is thinking about changing his major, so he has no idea what he’s going to be doing in life. He was raised in Taylorsville, Utah and served and LDS mission in Honduras. He has 3 siblings and loves to be outdoors. He loves skiing, no matter how much damage it might do to his body. I met him a little over a year ago and he has become one of my good friends at school. He is also very accident prone, which makes his stories very entertaining for the rest of us.

Context

I interviewed Draper at his house before he had to leave for an interview. I asked him to tell me the story of the iron as if he had not told it to me before. This is a story he hates, but loves to to tell. It’s something that we all remind him of constantly and make him tell to everyone. It’s become an inside joke for our friend group too. He told it to me and his roommate this time.

Text

So I don’t remember what we were doing that night honestly, but me and Andrew both got back to the apartment at like 2 A.M. after hanging out with...whatever we were doing, and so obviously I’m like half awake at that point and so we go to bed and I’m asleep and I wake up to, like, a pain in my face, like my head was in pain. I was like, ‘what the heck??’and it was like, I dunno, like that weird fog when you’re waking up and you don’t really know what’s going on, but for some reason my face hurt. And I like roll over in my bed and my iron was laying next to me and it kinda like slowly, I was like connecting, in my brain what happened and I was like ‘no way…’. And so I get up out of bed and walk into the bathroom and I look into the mirror and there’s just blood running down my face. And so at that point I started saying lots of naughty words [chuckles a bit] and I walk back into the room and I didn’t know what to do ‘cause it was like 4 A.M. at this point and so yeah, I cut my face open with my iron ‘cause it fell on my head, ‘cause there was a shelf above the beds and I had left it up there and left it unrolled, so I guess I had snagged the cord while I was sleeping and it fell and cut me on my eyebrow. So, I’m like kinda freaking out and I accidentally woke Andrew [Andrew was his roommate who is a medic for the army] up with my word choice and he wakes up and and looks at me and he’s like ‘what’s going on?’ and I turned my face and showed him and he jumped out of bed and he was like, well I got kinda dizzy and I don’t know why, I guess I’m kind of a wimp, but I kinda had to sit down on my bed because I was really kinda nauseous. So he told me, he’s like ‘stay awake! I’m gonna go down to my car and get my med kit.’ [he said this with a funny deep voice, trying to imitate Andrew]. He goes and gets his giant chest, you know you’ve seen it [he says this to me because I have indeed seen it]. But yeah I think he thought I was gonna like, die before he got to the room because he’s like ‘Stay awake!’ [same imitation] and I was like ‘ok??’. So he goes and get his big ol’ med kit and he’s got like, a bone saw and like everything in there, [laughs like he’s remembering how funny this is]. So yeah, he comes back, he’s like ‘dude I have stuff for sutures, I could sew you up’ [imitating Andrew in a funny voice again] and I was all, ‘have you ever done that before?’ And he was like ‘no, but I have a video of my brother getting stitches!’ [more imitations] and I was like, ‘uh, hold on’. So I called my dad at, like 4 A.M. which is never a good idea, obviously your parents don’t wanna get a call from any child in the middle of the night. So I call him, and I don’t know I guess I’m still kind of like half asleep, the first question I ask him is whether I should go to the hospital or not, like no context whatsoever and he’s like ‘well I don’t know son’ [he imitates his dad now, in a funny voice]. So I sent him a picture and he’s like ‘yeah you should probably go to the hospital’ and I was like, ‘well my roommate can sew me up, he has all the stuff’ and so my dad asks the same question, he’s like ‘has he ever done it before?’ and I was like, ‘no but he has a video’ [he says this kind of sheepishly] and he’s like ‘go to the hospital’ [he says this pretty matter-of-factly and then laughs]. So we went to the hospital and they, you know numbed me up, cleaned it up, sewed it up, and I kinda just sat there and listened to Brian Reegan’s ER sketch about ‘8, say 8’ while we were in the ER room and it was kinda funny. I woke up and it was kinda a bad experience, but once we go to the ER room, it was kinda just like, I can’t believe this happened, that’s hilarious and then so I got back home and went to bed and I think we got back at 6 and I woke up at 8 so it was like a solid 2 hour nap...so yeah it was a pretty rowdy night.

Texture

He told this story very light heartedly and often laughed to poke fun of himself and the situation. He really enjoys making people laugh and so anytime he can tell a story about himself being funny, he really works the crowd. This is clearly a story that he tells often, because he knows which parts to explain and which voices to do that will make people laugh.

Course

Introduction to Folklore

Instructor

Lynne S. McNeill

Semester and year

Fall 2017

Theme

G7: Human Traits

EAD Number

3.14.1.34

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