COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY – After enjoying a first weekend home, including free laundry and a reliably hot shower, Barnard first-year Elisabeth Roland sat outside of the 116th street gate by Columbia, crying into her hands while clutching a copy of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. “I don’t understand!” she wailed into the night, “how can no one from home be able to articulate the finer points of the female condition in the metamorphosis of Philomela?” After getting a cup of coffee from Joe’s, she calmed down enough to elaborate.
“Okay,” Roland began explaining to no one in particular, “I get off the train with all of my luggage — I was just reading Freud’s The Uncanny for class — and I see my dad. I run to him, of course, it’s midnight and I’m tired as hell, and I want to get home. So we’re in the car, and I turn to him after being pleasant and shit and I’m like, ‘God, this is just so heimlich…and unheimlich!‘ and my dad is just like, ‘What? Elisabeth, it’s too late for that, it’s midnight.'”
She took a sip of her coffee from Joe’s – “They don’t even know what non-corporatized coffee tastes like at home!” – and continued with her tirade. “Like, excuse me? First of all, there’s no such thing as too late to be discussing significant intellectual works, and secondly, I super didn’t appreciate him knocking on my door at three-thirty in the morning while I was reading a book on ethics to tell me to go to bed since I had to be up early for my “job interview”. Doesn’t he know how artificial the interview process is for understanding your fellow man? You can only really understand someone through an artfully constructed narrative voice like Woolf’s, and only once you have that glimpse of their soul can you decide whether or not they are suited to driving a Domino’s car. And even then, how could you judge a person’s worth based on what so-called ‘skills’ they possess? How inhumane have we become?”
When asked to comment on the situation, her father merely said “Whatever, I think I’ll just start a small publishing house for her to run – PR keeps saying that my fund’s social responsibility department has been lagging anyways.”
