The adhan is looking like a preferable alternative

I know I haven’t even been here for two full months yet, but I’ve already grown to hate somebody. And when I say somebody I actually mean an inanimate object that I’m convinced is determined to ruin me—and obviously if something is conscious enough to have a vendetta against me, it is a “somebody” as opposed to a “something.” Clearly I’m referring to my college’s chapel bell.

Being me, I don’t have the normal complaint that some non-future-priests in this college have, namely that the bell wakes them up. To be honest, the first time since my arrival on September 12th that I have ever been woken by this bell was this morning, when it went off at the buttcrack of dawn (okay, it went off at around 8:30).

No, my major complaint about this bell is that I think it is trying to make me crap my pants in complete and utter terror. Before I tell you how, you have to understand how skittish I am: the other day someone came through a doorway a little too quickly and I literally fell over with fright.

Okay, so now for this bell. Each morning I stumble, half-asleep and freezing cold, across the garden to the dining hall so I can have some breakfast. I’m sleepy to the point of disorientation, to the point where even remembering if I put pants on that morning is an intellectual challenge. The entire college is in silence, silence so powerful that you can probably hear the likely disgusting noise snails make as they ooze along. And each morning, just as I reach the most acoustically ideal place in the entire garden, the bell lets out a hearty:

BONG!!!!!

And just in case you didn’t hear that first earth-shattering BONG! the bell follows it up with about 30 more BONG!s in quick succession, like it’s the jackhammer of church bells. Like it's rubbing it in. My understanding is that the bell tells people when services are about to start, so I used to think that the bell was yelling at the ordinands, “GET YOUR LAZY ASSES OUT OF BED AND INTO CHAPEL!” (Note: I’m not suggesting that the ordinands are lazy, but rather that this asshole of a bell thinks that they are.)

Now though I’m pretty convinced that the first BONG! is actually a “BOO!” and the bazillion follow-up BONG!s roughly translate to “hahahahahahahahahahaha!”

Why is it laughing, you may well ask. Well, because after the first deafening BONG! I usually react pretty strongly. Sometimes I do a subtle flinch, like someone has just raised a hand to slap me. But sometimes I react in more obvious ways, like screaming “JESUS!” (always welcome in a seminary), or involuntarily flinging everything I’m carrying as if in self-defense, or sometimes I just fall over. Maybe I've made it obvious, but the terror I feel at hearing this bell is immense. The absolute terror I feel after hearing such a sudden BONG! shattering the sleepy silence is the sort of thing that, on a good day, makes me require a hug afterwards and that, on a bad day, makes me question the existence of God. I won't explicitly tell you how much of this is exaggeration for an effect, though if you've known me long enough you'll know that this likely isn't much of a stretch of the truth.

The obvious conclusion here is that this bell is an asshole who won’t stop his campaign of terror until I piss myself with fright .But I refuse to change what time I leave my apartment for breakfast so as to miss the bell. If we change our normal routines because we fear a terrorist will kill us make us pee our pants, then the terrorists have already won.