#2: Dining Halls

Sometimes, if you listen very carefully when you're walking on campus, you can hear a soft, ethereal rustling noise beneath the clamor of chitchat and confident footsteps. It's like the beating of a hummingbird's wings, only just reaching your ears, a delicate and fragile sound. What is this, you ask? Is it the tinkle of fairies' wings as they flitter across South Lawn? Is it the whispering of thought as it blossoms within the student body? Is it, dare I say it, the audible
incarnation of education itself?

No. It's the sound of people eating things.

Food is everywhere. In paper and plastic, in boxes, on plates, in hands, in mouths. Being chewed. Swallowed. Consumed. Obliterated. Terminated. People in college get hungry, damn it, and they ain't got time for no three-course meal--that paper's due tomorrow! A quick fix is needed, right here and right now.

Hence, dining halls.


Ah, the dining hall. An experience that alienates you and gives you food poisoning in one fell swoop! Delightful! Rows and rows of tables, filled to bursting with undergraduates (basically just freshmen) who are mortally terrified of eating alone. Hence, it is impossible to go to the dining hall without being hit by a wave of tangible loneliness. Or a wave of cheesy odor issuing from the kitchen. Either one.

It's the John Jay Dining Hall that really illustrates why these places are not a good idea. First of all, to get to the food, one must trudge past the line of dirty dishes. Nothing gives me an appetite more than the sight of half-chewed Stroganoff. It also smells vaguely like three-day-old green beans around those dishes, which makes me suspect people are sloppy about their food disposal. Beware.

Then, once you get to the food, it's kind of like a game of Murderer: you keep your head down and your eyes away from anyone else, so help you God. Any accidental eye contact automatically means one of two things: you're a) coveting their food with a passion equal to that of Sodom and Gomorrah, or b) so desperate for a seating partner that you are considering spilling your soup onto their shoes and offering lunch company as an apology. Neither of these things are attractive. Hence: eyes down, partner.

The food itself is polarizing. I personally don't mind blobs of grease on my salad; others, however, have become lifelong vegetarians based on John Jay meats. Make of that what you will. Oh, also they always have cookies. Always.

Once food is procured, sitting must happen. And therein is the major conundrum. Whether one succumbs to loneliness and sits, desolate and solitary as a lone barnacle on a large rock, or goes in futile search of companions, the facts are still the same: y'all's desperate. So the cardinal rule of dining halls--never ever ever ever go to one alone. If you do, you will leave a part of yourself at that oil-stained table and you will never get it back.