Ah, high school. A breeding ground for numerous urban legends, most of them baseless, a select few of them not. I have my own such "urban legend," but this isn't a legend. Except maybe in the figurative sense, in that it will live in the memories of the students in my high school for years to come. But it is, in fact, 100% true.

...Okay. 90% true.

The story goes that in 7th grade (around 2000) a classmate put a hamster in a microwave.

Here's the full story: the girl, whom we shall call "Miami T." for the sake of privacy, owned a hamster. During the winter, it had snowed, a rare occurence in the barren land of Missouri. Somehow, the hamster escaped into the harsh reign of General Winter (as it seems to us hicks the few times it snows). When Miami T. and her brother found it, they brought it back inside.

Of course, what would you want to do if you were trapped outside and came inside? You'd want to warm up. And what appliance helps warms things up? A microwave. Therefore, the obvious solution is to place the hamster in the microwave to warm it up. This sort of logic seemed valid. Of course, in their young and naive years, but it completely neglected important concepts like "microwave radiation is dangerous."

After about 20 seconds of spinning on that turntable of heat, the hamster turned crazy, so the story goes. In those 20 seconds, these preteens learned a lesson in logic and science, and realized that living things don't belong in a microwave. They immediately reached in and grabbed the hamster out. It had managed to chew off its leg, or at least a part of it.

The hamster, with its syncopated limb, lived for about two more months. After this, it, of course, died. So it goes.

This is the true story, as told to a friend of Miami T.'s by the Hamster Microwaver herself.

Now, when I asked numerous other less reliable sources, they recount the story much differently.

One iteration of the story goes that the hamster exploded in the microwave. Yet another story goes that the leg turned black, and over the course of the next few months, it gnawed off that leg completely. Of course, the image of the hamster sitting there, feeding itself on its own rotted flesh is somehow amusing and tragic.

Perhaps the wildest distortion is that it was a parrot! I won't go into details about how this supposedly ended, for this node is too small to contain them.

Yet almost undoubtedly, people will remember that Miami T. put a pet into the microwave, and something horrendous happened to it. The human mind has an uncanny affinity for remembering the extremely weird, funny, or grotesque. This will, of course, make her a legend to the students at my school, and in my class. The lesson is if you want to be remembered after high school, do something really weird, such as crossdressing in a cheerleader's uniform or taking pride in your love of math and physics, damning the social consequences. It's sorta like how Cleopatra is only known for the fact that she killed herself using an asp in a tub of goat's milk.

And oh yeah, to sympathize with the poor hamster, I'm sure I'd gnaw off my leg if my belly were suddenly heated by the convergence of microwave radiation.