Alarmed, I scuttled around campus to find that my world had turned upside down. In the Dod courtyard, members of PAWS gnawed on bacon. Several of them chased me, dressed like gigantic cabbages and screeching about government conspiracies against vegetables. “Save the beet, eat more meat!” they cried, pelting me with chicken nuggets. “Use your fork to eat more pork! Put down utensils when you see lentils!” It was only due to their bulky costumes that I was able to out-scuttle them to safety.
By this time I was all the way by the junior slums. Curiously, I noticed a great deal of activity a little ways off. I crept closer and immediately regretted my decision: Right in front of me, members of the Anscombe Society were freely soliciting one another for sex. The sheer shock value implicit in this sight caused me to shudder and avert my eyes, but it was too late: They had already noticed me. Rebuffing their advances, I quickly scurried away.
My only escape was to go to the farthest place possibly imaginable. A place with a whole new zip code, a whole new culture, a whole new way of life. I speak, of course, of Forbes. I wandered into the Forbes dining hall calmly, but what I saw made my jaw drop. There were trays everywhere. Trays on every chair, table, even on top of the food, which was itself situated on even more trays. Too confused to react further, I simply turned and left.
With life in some strange upheaval, I decided to establish a sense of normalcy by proceeding with my usual routine. This meant checking my e-mail 500 times in a two-minute timespan. So I trudged off to Frist to use the same germ-ridden computers that you, dear reader, have probably also used in the past 24 hours. But the shocking sights did not end in Frist. In one classroom, I saw the entire University administration actually asking the USG for advice about their proposals. In another, I saw a football player trying to lecture to a classroom full of unruly professors who wouldn’t stop texting one another on their iPhones (“lol im better than u cuz I got a nobel prize!” “ur a loser, my research rox”). Finally I reached a computer, where, to my great chagrin, I noticed an e-mail in my inbox about carrel assignments for next year’s thesis work. “But I’m too busy neglecting my JP to even think about my yet-unborn thesis!” I cried.
Having given up on the entire concept of normalcy, I sat down and read The Daily Princetonian. The news section had been replaced by 8,000 cartoons about doomed seniors trying to finish the big t-word. I found one column denouncing the Anscombe Society for its newfound sexual promiscuity, followed by a second column denouncing the first one as nitpicking, and a third one denouncing the second one as nitpicking about nitpicking. Some idiot even wrote a column about turning into a giant bug. As the metaphysical implications of this last point began to sink in, my brain started to explode and the room around me swirled wildly in a melted montage of pastel April colors. Out of the muddled puddle of uncontrollable confusion burst Franz Kafka, who promptly accused me of plagiarism in a thick German accent while pelting me with chicken nuggets.
And that’s when my alarm went off. The usual routine followed: I grunted, my roommate kicked me through the mattress, and I grudgingly climbed down from the top bunk to turn off the alarm. Relieved, I found that I had two decidedly-human legs. A quick walk around campus revealed that the PAWS groupies were still grumbling about meat, the Anscombe Society was still grumbling about sex, Forbes students were grumbling about their on-and-off relationship with trays, the USG was grumbling about the administration, and the ‘Prince’ columnists were grumbling about the grumbling; oddly enough, I was OK with all that. I’ll take our Orange Bubble, grumbling and all; grumbling clearly isn’t the worst that could happen. All was perceived to be wrong with the world, and that was all right by me.
Until, that is, I checked my e-mail and saw the carrel draw e-mail sitting placidly in my inbox, reminding me of next year’s thesis-initiated imprisonment in the bowels of Firestone.
I sighed heavily. With one last dark look, I grumbled, “I’d rather fight Franz Kafka.”
Christine Brozynski is a politics major from Mendham, N.J. She can be reached at cbrozyns@princeton.edu.
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