Artwork by Jesse Braun.
REFERENCE ROOM — In a stunning feat unknown to the Columbia Community until this point, Robin Easton, CC ‘20, managed to retain his seat in the highly coveted reference room in Butler for a whole week. The only issue is that he had died only two days into his time at that spot at the table. Medical professionals are still determining how he passed away, but preliminary reports indicate that it was a combination of Adderall, JJ’s Mozzarella Sticks, and not having slept since his first Earth Moon and Planets midterm in early October.
“Robin was such a grinder,” said his roommate Tag Eisenhower CC’ 20. “For as long as I knew him he would put his body through absolute hell simply because he didn’t possess a single shred of planning or basic organization. It’s too bad he’s dead, but hey, on the bright side, at least I have a dingle now.”
Easton was found by Ellen Seagal, BC ‘22, who was the first person to realize that the smell that had begun to form near him was not merely due to a lack of a shower. “I thought I had seen him in that exact position and those same clothes a few days earlier. I also thought I smelled something weird, but I dismissed it as the usual smell of black coffee and sadness in that room. When I tried to move him, though, he proved unresponsive and three fully unswallowed and slightly dissolved Ritalin pills fell out of his mouth.”
Easton’s death has pushed the Columbia administration to engage with the rampant issue of study drug use at Columbia. “We really aren’t gonna do anything about this,” said a representative from the administration. “I mean, we could start organizing classes to make sure that workload doesn’t always spike at the same time of the year, which in turn forces even the most diligent students to cram a great deal of work into a tiny window, but that would require effort and we are busy searching student’s rooms for drugs like the ones found on Robin at the time of his death.”
“I honestly don’t care about the whole health thing,” said Celine Yang SEAS ‘19. “This whole ‘saving a seat in Butler’ thing has gone too damn far. I’m sure one of his friend just left him there so he or she could come back after a full night’s sleep to one of the most coveted study spaces in the entire university. It’s just downright shameful behavior. I thought using a single notebook or a few sheets of paper was wrong, but your pal’s corpse is like a whole new level.”
