NORTHFIELD, MN — A 19-year-old religion student at Carleton College underwent a litany of inconveniences and unfortunate scenarios on Tuesday, Jan. 21. The following combination of events has caused the young man great strife and has led him into isolation and procrastination on his work for the Carletonian.
The student’s day started at seven o’clock in the morning with an alarm he hadn’t meant to set. After several futile attempts to fall asleep and about 100 Instagram reels, he resigned himself to getting up. As he tried to exit his bed, his metal water bottle collided with the wooden floor, in a catastrophic event that surely woke up his roommate.
Groggy and shivering from the cold air of his house, he staggered to the lavatory, only to realize it was occupied by his housemate. Though they reside in a dingle — a dingle that once was the largest double in the house — they decided that the shared bathroom was the preferred place for their lengthy morning routine. The housemate in question declined to comment.
After getting dressed, which was an extended process as the student realized his newly laundered clothing had not yet fully dried, he headed downstairs to find mercy from this already tragic day in a hot cup of coffee. But to his surprise, his favorite mug remained unwashed in the sink from the night before, and despite his diligent efforts in washing said mug, his coffee was lukewarm at best by the time he sat down for breakfast. He soon realized the only remaining apple in his kitchen, which was smuggled out of LDC the day prior, was already soft and mushy, his granola had gone stale and he had less than a half a serving of yogurt left. Following his pitiful breakfast, the young man realized the house’s recycling bin was overflowing yet again. Shortsightedly dragging the bin through the snow in subzero temperatures without a coat, he soon realized his keys were inside, and fell to his knees in despair.
The chaos of the morning led the student to omit one of the stops on his morning route to see all of his favorite grown-ups on campus, which typically spans across campus. On this fateful day the young man neglected to visit the chapel, causing a great stir among the professional staff of the Office of the Chaplain.
“I didn’t see him all morning,” College Chaplain Rev. Schuyler Vogel told the Carletonian. “I was sitting at my desk for hours, just waiting for him to stop by and stand in my doorway for 20 minutes talking about what he learned in Hebrew yesterday. If I’m being honest, I was scared. Where could he have been if not in the chapel? We had our weekly staff meeting and some of the chaplains were seriously considering organizing a search party.”
After spending two hours discussing if “Massa-freaking-chusetts” would be a phonetically correct word in Linguistics, rushing across campus in eight minutes just to arrive late to Hebrew and suffering through a pitiful meal in LDC, the student returned home to an ungodly amount of homework and several missed calls and texts from friends and family. He slogged through as much of his readings as his exhausted mind could muster, and then sent Instagram reels to his friends on OCS who were just waking up for the day. After waiting 30 minutes to shower while the house manager did their nighttime routine, the young man finally settled into bed just after midnight, about six-and-a-half hours before he had to wake up later that morning.
“Maybe tomorrow will be better,” he said, as his phone fell out of the charger, likely to run out of battery before morning.
