Intersession: Barred from the dining hall

The smell of probably not-that-great dining hall food teased me as I left the North C elevator, and I could hear laughter from the dining hall as I passed through the back hallway en route to the TV room. One wistful glance through the window in the door of Community Hall succinctly answered the question that we all ask at some point — though some of us more than others — the same question Mindy Kaling recently used as a title for her memoir: “Is everyone hanging out without me?” The answer, I realized, as I pressed my nose against the glass, was a resounding “Yes. They are. In the Whitman dining hall.”

Campus is an uninviting place when you don’t have a meal plan, a lesson I learned the hard way this Intersession. Sometime during the month of January, I missed an inconspicuous email with the subject line “Intersession Meal Plan” that calmly informed me — aside from two lines of bolded styling and a touch of red font, the email was not discernably urgent — that I needed to sign up for a meal plan for Intersession. I forgot about the deadline and blithely decided not to worry about it until I woke up on the Saturday after finals, hungry and hungover. Without food.

And so, as I am writing this, it has been a week since I last chatted with Catalina or Dave in Whitman while they swiped my prox. Dave would always greet me with a “Thank you for smiling!” — probably misinterpreting my pre-dinner manic grin for something other than an expression of hunger and anticipation.

It has been a week since I triumphantly claimed a booth at 6:30 p.m. or took laps around the servery, hoping that something appetizing would reveal itself upon a second, third or fourth inspection. It has been a week since I last visited the dining hall that really doesn’t deserve to be poeticized as earnestly as I just did.

But it’s been so long that my memory is starting to reek with nostalgia. For the past week, I have scavenged for food and eaten with no more than three people at a time, living the life of a combination hermit-hobo. The experience may have made me stronger, though probably not physically.

Scheduling my time during Intersession ended up being largely dictated by my exile from the dining hall. I slept a lot, as sleeping is by far the most effective distraction from wanting to eat, and I visited my sister in New York and spent a day at Columbia mooching off a friend’s meal plan. That meal at Columbia was bittersweet. Figuratively, at least. Literally, it was mostly sweet.

I remember my heart dropping at the sight of Columbia’s fro-yo machine, which is exactly the same one we have. And while there were a selection of toppings (Yes, toppings!!!), there were no waffle cones. That made me miss Whitman.

Back at Princeton, my friend — also without a meal plan — and I stuck together. On the walk back from Subway one day — six inches for lunch, six inches for dinner and an in-between snack of granola provided by a generous friend — we ran into an exceptionally large group of Asian tourists all wearing the same blue jacket. That was exciting, but really not as thrilling as slinking through Whitman in my pajamas to get a sandwich made by the friendly guy who makes sandwiches. The texts that my friend and I exchanged this week actually make campus sound like a refugee war zone:

“I just woke up ... the hunger continues.”

“Cereal for dinner ... ”

“I’m stealing chips from the place I volunteer at.”

But by far the saddest text I received this week was from a cute football player I would casually run into in the dining hall sometimes (#subtle). “I’m sure I will see you in the dhall.” Nope. Anyway, I’m signing my name on this article, so let me stop before I sound too pathetic. I’ll end with good news: as I write this, it’s Sunday, I am alive, and dinner is in two hours and 17 minutes.