5. 50 Years Late

Meaning, for at least the last 50 years, dining halls of American Universities haven’t realized that they aren’t open in conjunction with times that kids actually want to eat dinner. I understand that basic social injustices usually take a lot longer than needed to correct themselves (It’ll take another decade or so for gay marriage and weed to be completely good, despite the fact that American society has basically realized restrictions on both is unnecessary), but not staying open past 7 30pm is one of the more pointless travesties in all of America. Just NO need whatsoever.

6. Gary and the Shrimp

Say your dining hall has a highly popular stir fry station, and say they offer chicken, beef, and shrimp. But say they haven’t been offering shrimp for the past two months for some undisclosed reason clearly having nothing to do with despicable sanitary practices.

Say you’ve been intimidated by the length of the stir fry line for months now, but say that tonight is the night that you’ve gotta get over that fear. Say you want shrimp--you could’ve sworn they had shrimp--but don’t see it as you near the station. And say that now you have to order. And you really, really want shrimp. And that you’re too scared to ask for shrimp, because you don’t see it. But fuck being scared, because that was the whole point of getting on this line in the first place.

You (confidently): I’ll have shrimp, please.

Stir-Fry Dude: Shrimp?

You: Shrimp.

SFD: Ay, Gary. 

Enter Gary, another Stir Fry dude

Gary: Yea?

SFD: Get a load of this guy! He wants shrimp!

Gary: Shrimp?

SFD: Shrimp! He wants shrimp!

Gary: Whatz he, an idiot or somethin’? Shrimp?

SFD: Shrimp!

And that is my story of Gary and the Shrimp.

7. Night-Plan Adjustments

I recall a time early in college when I wanted to hook up with this girl, who conveniently happened to be friends with this group of people I was getting tighter with and wanted to hang out with more (Turns out they’re “eh,” but so am I, so no harm, no foul).

Since I was somewhat of an outsider at that point, I had to approach the sitch strategically--my plan was to send an innocuous text to the dude I was closest with early enough in the night to nab a seemingly spontaneous invite to the pregame I assumed they were having. The trick I felt, was to be as off the radar as possible until text sending time, as this would indicate that I definitely wasn’t spending the entire day figuring out how I should best approach my chances of hooking up with this girl.

But of course, I go to the dining hall that night and see this kid, sitting a few tables across from me. Strategy gone, because I couldn’t possibly spend all of dinner not acknowledging him, only to text him an hour later what he was doing--I mean I could've done that, but this was 2008, when phones were only beginning to turn into the basis of all human communication. So I knew that (a. I couldn’t leave without planting that oh-so crucial Bro seed, but (b. couldn’t come off as too enthusiastic, because insinuating that I was anything other than overwhelmingly better than everyone and everything in the world is not how you make friends at Georgetown University.

Long story short, I strategically time “bumping into him,” casually get at what he’s doing tonight (while trying to act as half-asleep as possible) he tells me, I vaguely appear interested, and everything from there took care of itself. Don’t thank the dining hall.

8. How Much Do You Complain?

Really, how much can actually complain about a place where you literally have hundreds of food options, can eat as much as you want, for basically as long as you want, multiple times a day. Particularly when that kid deep into the school’s social justice stuff is blitzing you with depressing stats about how many little kids go starving every night?

(A lot.)

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