You will encounter things throughout your life that are blessings in disguise.
First, the blessing.
It's Tuesday at 10:00 p.m. My unwritten article was supposed to be turned in over 24 hours ago, and I'm currently walking around First Floor Berry asking people for ideas about the environment. With no luck on FFB, I walk down to Novack, have my nightly stare-off with the Spanish Armada of Full Throttle Blue Demon: Sabor Agave Azul energy drinks, and attempt to decide on a snack. I look up at the board of hot options and notice that one of the choices is "grilled cheese."
The blessing is that this chance encounter with the hot options became the cure for my writer's block. The truth of the matter is, unfortunately, that the rest of this article depicts anything but a blessing.
I order this grilled cheese and immediately every Novack employee looks at me with the confused look of "Wait, we have grilled cheeses?" One looks in the back, and in exactly a minute and a half, returns to the main counter with my order.
This is when the story takes a turn for the "Dartmouth is trying to kill me."
Imagine this. Instead of a finely toasted grilled cheese sandwich on a clean white circular plastic plate, this very attractive Novack worker hands me something that resembles the packaging for space food. You can't make out what's inside of the exterior casing, because it is silver and full of greasy condensation.
She looks at me in the eyes and says, "You have to take the first bite here. I have got to see this."
What she is saying to me doesn't immediately register, because I can't stop staring at what could be my last supper. After about 30 seconds, I come to and realize that for dinner I will be dining on "Buddy's Grilled Double Cheese on Texas Toast." The packaging claims it's made with real cheese and conveniently crisps in the bag in 90 seconds.
The next two minutes are fuzzy, and I'm not sure if I ever paid, but I do remember walking from Novack to the 1902 room, holding my dinner like a father holds his infant the first time his child has a dirty diaper. I was scared, frantically screaming my wife's name, and everything I had read in preparation for this very moment was fleeing my brain faster than Xenu's engineless DC-8 spacecraft.
For the 99 percent of us that understand that reference, feel free to skip to the next paragraph. For the rest of you, for the sake of brevity, basically 75 million years ago or so, Xenu was about to be kicked out of power because of overpopulation issues, so he called what would now be referred to as a "town meeting" about income tax inspections, paralyzed and froze everyone in a mix of alcohol and glycol -- which successfully captured their souls -- put everyone on his engineless DC-8 spacecraft and flew to Earth (or Teegeeack as it was then referred to), where he lined the soulless, paralyzed people around the bases of all the world's volcanoes, and detonated the volcanoes simultaneously with the help of hydrogen bombs.
Back to the WMD that was my dinner.
I take "it" back to the 1902 room, and after a good deal of soul searching, I give in and take a bite. As soon as a swallow the bite, I immediately know something has gone terribly wrong. I can actually feel those important arteries clogging by the second, and I begin to feel slightly winded.
As I start to panic, I turn the industrial packaging over to find some of the most startling nutrition facts known to man. I'm not going to lie, by Dartmouth giving the OK for these to be sold, it's handling its overcrowding as responsibly as Xenu.
When Dartmouth said everyone needs to make budget cuts of 10 percent, it also means in the size of the student body, and apparently the Board of Trustees' best plan of action (Haldeman strikes again) was to unleash this diabetes stick on campus.
Some of the nutrition highlights (serving size = one sandwich):
Four hundred and twenty calories (140 of which are from fat).
Twenty-eight percent of your daily total fat and 45 percent of your daily saturated fat.
Thirteen percent of your daily cholesterol.
Thirty-eight percent of your daily sodium.
Zero percent of your daily Vitamin C.
Dartmouth, there are more respectful ways than this to kill off part of your student body. If you had any class, you would put one of those Surgeon General's labels they use for cigarettes on the sandwich that reads, "You will help Dartmouth make it through this recession by eating this delicious sandwich and then dying."
I would go on about the outcome of this dangerous encounter, but I'm living through it as I type. I'm currently sweating bullets, and I keep trying to Good Sam myself, but I don't know where I am and Officer Willy can't find me.
Thanks a lot Dartmouth. I thought passing Hip Hop Booty and Abs was going to stand between me and graduating. Who knew it would be Texas Toast?
