The Memory Hole

awkward meal number 1.

Throughout my entire life, especially my college career, pretty much every social event is punctuated by something awkward, especially meals.  Maybe it’s just because I’m a fat bastard, but I know despite usually being an inherently social event, I always feel like I am going to mess up somehow while eating—get food all over the place, spit food in other people’s faces, and fart.

But that’s just every meal for me.  Sometimes there are things that make them especially awkward.  For me, the first time in college came literally on the first day of classes of my first semester in university.  So that dates this story to lunchtime on a Monday in the Fall of 2004.

Awkward factor #1: I was meeting a girl from the internet.

Perhaps a little backstory is in order.  By now, it should be clear to anyone that knows me that I don’t have any aversion to meeting strangers from the internet, since I clearly lack the skills to meet people in any other way.  I’m a huge nerd.  And arguably, I was an even bigger nerd back in the high school days.  Such a nerd, in fact, that I belonged to a mailing list whose subject was the video game Final Fantasy.  To make things worse, occasionally groups of us from this Final Fantasy Mailing List would meet up at Anime Expos, hang out, and share hotel rooms.  So I had met a bunch of people from the internet, and even shared sleeping quarters with them, since I was like fourteen.

I can’t believe I just wrote those last couple of sentences, and that they’re completely true and non-fictional.  This is the stuff of my nightmares, the fact that those statements are actually true.

Anyway, on this Final Fantasy Mailing List, there was a girl my age who was also from Hawaii.  And surprise, surprise, she was entering UH at the same time I was.  I had never seen her before or even spoken to her outside of emails and IM conversations, but for some reason we decided that we should totally hang out once school started.  I’m not sure why.  I guess we had talked to each other on AIM for two years, and now we’d be going to the same school at the same time, so it just made sense.

It was stupid for me.  I’m such an antisocial person, and already, college was this new overwhelming thing, it was crazy—living in a dorm, going to classes at random times, et cetera.  It was the first day, and here I was planning to put myself into a stressful (to me—I know, I’m insane) situation of meeting a new person whom I had talked to online a bunch.

Usually I will just find a way to weasel out of any situation I’m uncomfortable with (i.e. most situations) but maybe my whole avoidance system was overloaded by the newness of university life, or maybe I really thought that college was just going to be meeting new people 24/7, so I thought I’d have to deal with it anyway.

I remember her calling me a bit before noon, saying she was on her way down to the dorm cafeteria.  I had big knots in my stomach.  I should say it had nothing to do with it being a girl or anything, it was mostly like “oh man I dunno what this person is gonna be like, and I’ve spoken to them for a while and what if I’m really different in person and they hate me, this is so weird why am I even doing this?”

Okay, a small part of it probably had to do with my lunch partner being a girl.  But I wasn’t thinking of this as a date or something that might even lead to that, she was just a random internet friend that I now happened to go to school with.

But enter awkward factor #2: Chino.

Chino is a really good guy.  He’d been one of my closest friends in high school since we had a lot of the same classes, and he almost always was positive and upbeat.  Chino is still a good friend of mine, so I really hope he doesn’t take this the wrong way.

But for Chino, especially at this time, stuff was always about “the chicks.”  I think he really had crazy expectations for college, when we were going in, that our lives were gonna go crazy and we were gonna be banging chicks left and right and there’d be girls everywhere.

So when I told him about meeting A GIRL for lunch, on the very first day of school, he made it out like this girl was probably going to be my first college conquest.  He was making it sound like I had “picked up” this girl and it was totally a date, or more.  Of course, having him talk like this just made it more awkward for me.  What did I know?  Was he right?  Should I be treating this as something more?

Of course not.  But when you’re an awkward teenager in a really weird situation, you can quite easily doubt yourself, especially when someone as confident and powerful as Chino is interjecting alternate suggestions in your ear the whole time.

Fuck, I was way more nervous now.

I met her, for the first time in real life (as the saying goes), outside my dorm.  Meeting people from the internet, it can be a really weird thing.  I don’t think humans are quite fully adapted to it yet, to have simultaneously this background and friendship and at the same time be overwhelmed by this feeling of “I don’t know this person.”

This one wasn’t any weirder than any other, but it wasn’t any smoother, either.  I remember going to the cafe, echoes of Chino’s comments started to ring in my ears.  I had a meal plan, since I lived in the dorms, but she didn’t.  She started to pay, and I was thinking nervous thoughts to myself, “Shit, is this a date? Should I be paying?!”

At that time, I was definitely my fattest, and with a meal plan to the all you can eat dorm cafeteria, well, let’s just say typically I was ingesting a lot of food at any given meal.  I remember, though, I was so nervous, I just followed her lead.  She got one slice of pizza.  So I got one slice of pizza.  That’s all I ate for that entire meal.

Me?  At the dorm cafe, eating just one slice of pizza?  You now have proof that I was an awkward, nervous wreck during that meal.

We sat down, and the conversation proceeded.  Like I said, it’s weird.  We had chatted so much in the past on computers, but now in person, it just turned to the typical “I just met you” smalltalk.  ”So, how was your first class today?  Are you liking school here so far?”  That kind of thing.

The conversation and the conservative eating of just one slice of pizza, slowly (to not look like a fat pig, of course), was awkward enough.  But then Chino made a reappearance.

I’m not sure if he was just there to keep tabs on how my lunch was going or if it was just a coincidence, but I think it was a little of both.  He was perfectly seated behind her so that I could see him just fine, but she would have no idea.  And the whole time, whenever I made eye contact with him, he was giving me the biggest shit-eating grin.

At one point, during a moment of prolonged eye contact, he nodded at the girl and seriously gave me a huge thumbs up, as if to say, “Yeah, she’s hot dude, way to go.”  It was really creepy, especially since obviously that was not where this meal was headed at all.

That’s about it.  The meal ended uneventfully, she went back to class and I went back to my room.  As far as I can recall, I never actually hung out with her socially again, although we definitely bumped into each other a few times and we were still friendly.

It wasn’t a terribly bad meal, or anything special in terms of awkwardness.  I just find it amazing that, going into my college career, I stumbled (fell?) out the gate with a pretty awkward encounter, no wonder my entire career would be cursed.  I didn’t even get one good, non-weird lunch under my belt before shit started to go all strange.

But really, the one thing I’ll never forget about that lunch was Chino’s damn smile and thumbs up.  That’s really what all these words were for.

steak night.

Freshman year of university. The only year I was living in the on-campus dorms, which were different than living in the on-campus apartments, because you were required to have a meal plan.

The logic behind it made sense. In the apartments there were full kitchens, so it was plausible that students were cooking their own food. But in the dorms, they didn’t want students to starve to death, and even if parents just gave their kids a bunch of money to go buy food, very little of it would probably be put to that purpose. 99% of it would probably go to booze or illicit substances, with the remaining 1% spent on impulse-buy munchies at 7-11.

But in truth, the meal plans themselves were huge scams designed to line the pockets of Sodexo, our school’s food service contractor that ran basically everything that served food on campus. They were extremely expensive, if I recall correctly the cheapest plan was way north of another thousand dollars added to the already expensive dorm rental fees.

They were also designed so that they weren’t really that good of a value. Like, okay, if you spent $1000 upfront but could eat every meal every day on campus for free, maybe it would work out. But there were always weird rules, like you could only eat a certain amount of times per day, or only at certain places, or things like that.

The one my mom got me was pretty decent, I could eat two meals a day at the dorm cafeteria, I think all seven days a week.  But it didn’t stack, so I couldn’t eat one meal on Monday there and then eat breakfast, lunch, and dinner on Tuesday.  So if I ever chose to eat out elsewhere, that was a “lost” meal that I paid for but didn’t receive. I also didn’t get any allowances at any other of the Sodexo food vendors, it was the cafeteria or nothing.

The cafeteria wasn’t terrible, it’s been the topic of a few posts already here. After subsisting on it for a year, though, I can happily say I never wanted to eat there again. The food was also really greasy and bad for you, almost surely responsible for untold numbers of Freshman 15s every semester.

It was buffet style, and they had different stations, a pizza station, a grill station, a pasta section, et cetera. I think I wrote about this before in the vegetarian dinner entry.

Anyway, there was one shitty night. Thursday night. Steak night. For some reason, on Thursdays the cafeteria would forego its typical food for steak night. My first week at school, a few people told me about it excitedly.

“Oh man, just wait until Thursday. It’s STEAK NIGHT! If you eat at the cafeteria one night a week using your meal plan, make it steak night!”

These kids that told me this didn’t seem to be alone, either. Thursday night was the one night a week where it was pretty much a given that you’d be waiting in a line out the door to get in for dinner service. Sometimes, it was a really long line where you’d have to wait upwards of half an hour.

But I’m going to let you in on a little secret: steak night fucking sucked. After you waited in the long line, you were given a ticket for your entree. The cafeteria was usually all you can eat, but I guess steak is too expensive for that, so you were only allowed to get one serving.

Now, I’m not a huge steak fanatic, but it was pretty much in the same class as the other low-grade shit that Sodexo served every other meal of the day. I can’t honestly imagine that this steak cost much at all, since it had the texture and appearance of an abused tire. And it wasn’t just a bad cut of meat, it was also tiny as hell, I guess again due to cost issues. You got about three bites of meat, along with a potato, I think.

You did have an alternative to go for a chicken breast, and after a while I ultimately just began opting for that every week as the year wore on. Chicken’s chicken, it was nothing spectacular but at least it wasn’t a colossal disappointment like the steak was.

To make it even lamer, when it was steak night, the steak/chicken distribution took up one of the other stations, I think it was usually the grill (burger/fries/sandwich/chicken nuggets) station, which was typically my favorite station, so you not only had to eat your one little serving of crappy steak (or chicken), but you couldn’t get the other stuff that was at least decent.

I never understood why students would get so amped up about steak night, nor why Sodexo even bothered at all.

Fuck steak night.