Ian is taller than average, built like a husky energetic boy. He has a slightly loose tongue and lips, imprecise, and in moments of excitement one might notice (unkindly) them glistening more than usual with saliva from this loose-lippedness.
He came to moments of excitement easily, not lustily or knowingly, but with a good-natured panache all the same. I knew him at college; we hung out and drank beer and smoked pot together. We were part of the same crew that mostly socialized in each other's dorms (much cheaper than going out), and there were some dominant personalities (not me; not Ian) who spent most of that time playing asinine video games and “letting” us watch, insisting that what transpired was, in fact, fun. Even typing this out it's clear this was pretty miserable, but yeah; we were all pretty miserable in our own ways and this is how we hung out.
Ian was in Mather house, a 70s labyrinth that could have been truly Brutal if it had tried harder. His room, though, was quite comfy – all the rooms had at least one non-right angle wall, and his room featured two windows on a corner that both opened, making for great breezes (summer cooldown, conceal smoke, etc).
Ian was taller than average and when he was in his cups his eyes had a charming, faraway quality – simultaneously sharp and bright, like an Irish uncle with a joke on his mind, and sleepy and faraway, like Alec Baldwin if he was a good person.
Silhouette-wise, Ian was a little torso-heavy. Not overweight, but imbalanced. In Disney comics, there is often an innocuous, slightly vacant-and-aloof character called Gus – Gus is Donald's cousin and when he visits, he innocently/relentlessly eats, eventually clearing out all of Donald's food.
Ian had been sleeping poorly for a few weeks; he was dealing with some stress, and all of his friends were acting exactly the same as they always did.
I don't know how it happened exactly. In the dead of winter some dorms got really hot – they turn on the central heating and expect you to open windows, install window-fans, etc to regulate your temperature. Ian had a pretty robust box-fan setup that Wolf had contrived (one semester Wolf took fluid dynamics, and went around everyone's dorm weathersealing and installing fans so they could smoke anywhere and be confident the smoke would leave through a known (inoffensive, covert) route).
Ian woke up in the middle of the night and was sweat-hot. Well, he didn't wake up – he jerked out of bed and, semi-asleep, tried to rearrange the bedclothes so that he could sleep on cooler surfaces. In the process of this, he opened a normally-closed window, immediately creating a strong vortex in the room (the window had not been part of Wolf's air-management plan; opening it would drastically change the pressure differential he had created throughout the rest of the 7-room dorm). In this unexpected maelstrom, the half-asleep Ian had tried to flatten and re-puff a dorm pillow – it ripped neatly in half as he flapped it against his legs, pouring 2-3 gallons of down into the maelstrom. Ian was confusingly and thoroughly caught (still half-awake, quarter-sober) in a whirlwind of feathers.
We knew this had happened not because he volunteered this experience, but because the next day at lunch, he reached into his pocket for his ID and a tiny cloud of feathers followed his hand out of his pocket.
The feathers had been pervasively, thoroughly incorporated into his laundry. They would not go away with a simple washing, because they matted down and adhered to the insides of pockets when wet. Inevitably, when he wore a garment fresh from the laundry, every dig into a pocket would yield a curious, subtle puff of down. It was as if a witch had cursed him to always be in a cloud of feathers.