Meghan M. Williams last wrote for The Toast about her homeschooling clothing choices.
Before I was baptized at Westminster Presbyterian in upstate New York, I cried uncontrollably. When my parents asked what was wrong, I wailed that I didn’t want to be “bad-tized,” I wanted to be “good-tized.” I was three years old.
I was always “the good child,” the quiet girl in a passel of boys, the “diamond in the rough” (my parents’ words, not mine.) It helped that I had a naturally conscientious personality and was raised in a religion that outlines things in convenient black and white.
It took 18 years for me to start measuring what it meant to be “good” by any other yardstick than “abstaining from acts routinely defined by the Christian church as sinful.” And it took stealing cucumbers.
Growing up, the tiniest transgressions kept me up at night, ruminating them like loose teeth. I was always aware that my “goodness” was sword-of-Damocles precarious, one big ol’ sin away from badness. Here are the things that cost me untold hours of sleep:
1. At age 7, I found some spilled fries on a McDonald’s playground and threw them like spears at the butt of a woman who was just trying to supervise her kid’s birthday party. I allotted myself points for shots that nailed one or the other buttocks. (I don’t have kids yet, but when I do, I feel there is a karmic punishment waiting for me out there somewhere, in a ball pit that smells like vomit and sweat.)
2. At age 8, I played Bloody Mary in the church childcare bathroom with an older girl while my mother was at her weekly women’s Bible study. Bloody Mary never appeared but the daycare workers still called what I did “black magic.”
3. At age 11 my homeschooled best friend cut a page with her crush’s photo on it out of my older brother’s yearbook. This was especially egregious because my brother has a fairly severe mental and developmental disability and he loved that yearbook dearly. I spent an hour picking the jagged remnants of the page out with tweezers and then lied to my brother and parents, saying the school must have accidentally misprinted a copy (genius, right?) Ultimately an intercepted letter got me busted.
That’s pretty much it. I did some other weeny-like things—pushed my beans onto my brothers’ plates, convinced one brother to pee on himself on a family car trip, lured some neighbor boys into a big cardboard box and then sat on it (after they gave my older brother a wedgie though)—but nothing drastic.
I never drank or smoked or cheated or shoplifted or even violated school dress codes, and I only skipped class with my mother’s full endorsement and to do things like buy prom makeup or study more for the SATs. I was president of my youth group and volunteered at a leper colony outside Seoul. When a journalism trip to Japan descended into debauchery, I was the only one of ten high school students who ordered soda instead of a Sex on the Beach (alcoholic AND risqué!) at the Hard Rock Café Tokyo.
If you’ve ever wondered whether prissy people derive enjoyment from being prissy, I can tell you that yes, they totally do! For me, rules never felt restrictive; they were just handy guidelines to being good. The satisfaction of knowing I was doing the right thing (whilst observing other people doing the wrong thing, because I’d be lying if I claimed there wasn’t at least a tiny judgmental aspect to this) was its own reward.
After high school, I went to a Christian college where all students had to sign a community covenant stating we would not drink, smoke, have premarital sex, cheat or do any anti-Biblical things while enrolled.
Nearly everyone I knew took The Covenant, as we called it, very seriously, and so did I. There were hiccups, including the time a friend spiked a pot of coffee with perhaps half a shot of Bailey’s and severely riled up several unwitting drinkers. And I started to notice seams here and there, i.e., suggesting people “pray for someone” was often a thinly veiled excuse to gossip about how they were totaling making out with their significant other in the prayer chapel. But all in all, I fit in well with a group of like-minded young people. The year passed without incident.
Then, two months into my sophomore year, on a late Sunday morning when I was eating brunch in the cafeteria instead of attending church (RED FLAG), the idyll ended. I found myself on the wrong side of good vs. bad and it was disorienting, as if I woke up and realized I’d been walking on ceilings my whole life.
First, I should point out my college didn’t have a Greek system. For obvious reasons. However, we were more talented at jamming men and women together in forced social interactions than any dating reality show producer.
We had raids, though not of the panty variety. These were late-night surprise parties where a women’s floor would descend on its brother floor, or vice versa, and regale them with skits, food and deranged late-night flirting. We had roulettes: group dates in which partners were supposed to be selected randomly, but we all knew they were as rigged as the chapel seating charts that consistently placed seniors in the balcony. And, finally, we had floor banquets, which ran the gamut from simple dinners to staged talent shows. Everyone (including me; I won’t pretend I was above it) took these things seriously, like, costumes/face paint/practicing-for-days seriously
My floor was hosting a banquet for our brother floor the evening of my fall from grace. Some of the thriftier girls had decided we should take salad toppings from the cafeteria rather than purchasing them at the Jewell-Osco. Apparently there was room in the budget for spaghetti, meat sauce and bags of lettuce, but not olives.
I wasn’t at the floor meeting when this was decided, but my suitemate, who I’ll call Jenny, attended and got roped into procuring the vegetables. I only learned of the plan after I “overslept,” missed church and went to a late cafeteria brunch with Jenny.
At no point when we were discussing what vegetables to take (snow peas? radishes? does anyone like radishes, really?) did it occur to me that we were talking about theft, which was consummately bad. I can’t tell you what my thought process was, because there wasn’t one. There was no explicitly stated rule against taking food out of the cafeteria, so as a dyed-in-the-wool rules-follower, I was footloose and fancy-free.
Jenny came equipped with a half-dozen plastic containers and after we’d eaten our pizza and chocolate milk, in the ten minutes before the cafeteria closed for the day, we went up and started heaping vegetables on plates with less guile than Barney Fife doing his rounds in Mayberry.
I was headed back to our table, carrying a plate piled high with sliced cucumbers, prettily ribboned at the edges, when I felt a presence swooshing in behind me. I set the cucumbers down just as the presence closed in and asked, “Are you going to eat all of those now?”
Not being a liar, I replied, “Umm…no?”
Standing behind me was our cafeteria manager, a very tall, imposing woman with very broad shoulders who didn’t interact with students except to glower from the edges of the dining hall and enforce the 100% markup on guest meal pricing. What I wouldn’t have given for it to have been the head chef, who was German and jovial.
The manager turned to Jenny and, in one unceremonious motion, whipped open the messenger bag resting next to her chair. Inside was a rainbow of containers filled with cherry tomatoes, green bell pepper and other stupid vegetables. Probably carrot shreds.
“This is theft,” the manager said in that tone of voice that’s not quite yelling, but several steps above the standard “inside voice.”
“Give me your ID cards. I’m going to see to it that you don’t eat here again for the rest of the semester. And you’re lucky I’m not calling the police.” (This is all paraphrased; the tongue-lashing went on for several minutes.)
We didn’t protest, just handed over the cards, cowed into silence, and slunk back to our dorm. Without our ID cards we couldn’t unlock our rooms, so we slumped on the dingy carpet in the hall until one of our roommates, flushed with the warm glow of someone who’s faithfully attended church, showed up.
I remember Jenny, who was more of a badass than me, reacting calmly, or at least projecting calm. I, however, was a total mess.
I couldn’t stop rehashing my sin and its potential consequences—if forced to forfeit my meal plan, which cost eleventy billion dollars, I’d be able to afford about five bran muffins from the campus coffee bar before starving.
Even worse was the thought that I had done something really, truly bad, Covenant-breaking bad. And I did it as blithely as falling down an unmarked step. Was I not actually a good person? Was I total shit head? My mind went into that hyper-drive (also commonly experienced after car accidents) where you replay the moment of doom, over and over, willing yourself to somehow go back in time and undo it. At that moment, I realized the “funny” time I broke off and ate a large piece of a waffle cone resting on the counter at our campus hamburger/ice cream joint was also stealing. And ruining a perfectly good ice cream cone.
I was a shit head. No doubt.
In the middle of my existential crisis, banquet preparations were in full swing and I was still expected to attend with my “date” from the brother floor. My friends gamely fixed my hair and makeup (at one point ordering me to stop crying so my eyeliner and mascara would stay put) while I sobbed on the phone to my parents in Germany, who, to their credit, were as nonplussed as Jenny. They assured me the whole thing would blow over.
They were wrong. Our RA returned our IDs that night and informed us the Dean of Student Life had scheduled separate meetings with us the following day.
I was an editor at the school newspaper and had to leave our weekly staff meeting early to see the dean. My fellow editors and writers were supportive and amused— word of mine and Jenny’s misfortune had already spread faster than the campus tower bells announced engagements, plus the cafeteria manager had called the editor-in-chief suggesting they write a story about my crime.
When I heard that, the briefest ray of sunshine interrupted my self-flagellation as I thought, “How absurd. An article about someone stealing cucumbers. That is the least newsworthy thing that has ever happened here since they started allowing square dances.” But then I just went back to self-flagellation, as you do.
I bawled all during my meeting with the dean, who was very kind and relaxed. I explained my side of the story, which amounted to the ignorance defense, apologized profusely and waited for her to pronounce the magic words: “You are forgiven.”
But no, I was ushered out and told to expect her decision by campus mail. I didn’t sleep for two days until I received the letter—incidentally, on the same day that my now-husband first contacted me after we met during a flood (but that’s another story.)
The letter said that, due to my “repentant heart,” I wouldn’t have my meal plan revoked or be otherwise seriously scourged. The relief was like stepping into a cold shower after the first time you go running in Texas during summer (trust me, just trust me.)
They didn’t let me off easy on making amends—instead of paying for the vegetables (which I offered to do in my meeting with the dean), the letter outlined that I was required to stand at the cafeteria exit for 90 minutes during one lunch period and one dinner period, attempting to catch thieves.
I followed through on this, lurking in the shadows near the tray accumulator, though I didn’t confront anyone because 1. what was I supposed to do? Ask them to empty their pockets and escort them to campus police? and 2. I was just too ashamed—of myself, of the public punishment, of everything.
The whole saga (this is a funny pun if you figure out what school I went to) crescendo’ed and faded out in less than a week. Eight years later it’s just another funny anecdote I throw out when trying to explain my unique college experience.
But stealing cucumbers and getting caught did have a long-term effect on me, more powerful than all my other sins combined. It cured me of my desire to be good.
Don’t get me wrong: I don’t break laws and I’m still constitutionally incapable of going over to “the dark side” of anything. I still believe there is such a thing as right and wrong, objectively, in most scenarios. And I know that stealing cucumbers (or waffle cones or anything else) is wrong, and that, in many ways, I was lucky the consequences weren’t more serious.
I took a hard look at my tendency to value rules (or the lack thereof) over common sense and realized my devotion to goodness had been brainless. In a sense, the letter from the dean was prescient: I did begin to think more carefully about my decisions, eventually coming to understand that just because something isn’t proscribed doesn’t mean it’s ok, and just because people are following the letter of the law doesn’t mean their intentions are pure.
Instead of seeing goodness as an innate trait achieved by trying super hard, I now think of it more as an external measure of how the things I do/say/believe affect other people.
In short, I started thinking for myself.
The cafeteria posted signs the week after my bust, designating the maximum amount of food to be taken out as one sandwich and one other small item, i.e., a piece of fruit. I saw dozens of pranksters continue to sneak out entire pizzas and fruit pies, but as far as I know, none of them ever got caught.
and current writer living in Austin. Her #1 piece of advice is do as
many embarrassing things as you can now, so you can write about it
later.
Jesus, if they did all that when you took cucumbers I can’t imagine what they would have done if you broke a real rule. I guess expelled?
Wheaton? 😉
I’ve got my own experience with Christian education, and really enjoyed this article. Thanks for sharing!
HA I really thought it would take more than two comments before somebody figured out the school. Thanks for reading!
A++ for the “true crime” tag. I had a similar experience with a completely disproportionate response to something I did in high school, and yeah, I would not say it instilled in me a greater respect for authority. I’m not sure why people think it will?
Yes, as a mostly good kid who listened to and respected teachers, plus got good grades, any time I got in “trouble” for something that seemed absurd, it just made me lose respect for authority. And I would just be rolling my eyes, thinking there’s no way you’re going to actually punish me for this. (In high school and later – I didn’t have that much confidence when I was young.)
Yup. I am also a rule-follower and I remember the time I got in “trouble” for breaking a rule that literally everyone else was breaking, but I got in trouble because the people in charge “knew I knew better.”
It was the first step onto a slippery slope, but not the one they always warned me about.
YES to the bit about how “rules just tell you how to be good.”
Who else here went to a church where they did preach “everybody is a sinner” but did not preach “original sin,” so maybe the younger version of you stood smugly in services thinking “this doesn’t apply to me, I didn’t sin this week?”
*raises hand*
Out of curiosity, which denomination? This applies to me as well, haha.
I was raised United Methodist. 🙂
stealing cucumbers was yourfirst mistake because cucumbers are unapologetically terrible.
The worst salad ingredient
I would rather a chopped salad of cucumbers and tomatoes than a salad whose base is iceberg lettuce.
Discuss.
Iceberg lettuce and celery can both fuck right off.
No, that would be olives. Sorrynotsorry.
it must be terrible being wrong all the time. :/
I still have, and use, two small condiment bowls that I stole from my college dining hall. I feel no now guilt about this, nor did I feel a single shred of guilt about it at the time. Perhaps I am a monster, but the china really is very sturdy.
I stole a bowl and plate from my dining hall… and then I took them back, a few days later, because I felt guilty.
Yep, 15+ years later I still have a few ramekins and forks from the ol’ dorm days…
A friend of mine stole a water bottle embellished with the college crest, while I told her firmly that I Disapproved. She then went to the bursary and asked them (“for a friend”) how much a water bottle would cost if someone wanted to buy one.
We are not good at rulebreaking.
GRRRRRRRRR waterbottle stealers are the bane of any college butler’s life. (p.s. they are expensive)
I stole a chair. The ones in my residence’s rooms were terrible and uncomfortable, but the new fancy residence on the other side of campus had nice ones in their cafeteria. A friend of mine and I went over there one night, found an unlocked door, and carried chairs back. I don’t remember feeling guilty at all: fuck the rich kids and their far-nicer residences.
Chickpeas…are you me? I also have and use two small condiment bowls. I don’t feel guilty, either, but it’s because I returned at least one of the two ficus trees I also took…
maybe? I don’t think I ever stole a tree? I can’t, however, say with certainty that I never stole a tree. So.
I helped myself to a whole buttload of food from my college cafeteria once, including an entire box of cereal (hooray for large backpacks!). This, however, was only because my younger sister was visiting for the weekend, and instead of letting me use a guest pass, the monitor charged me $15 for her dinner.
(Lest you think this wasn’t that much money, it was college cafeteria food and this was in 1988.)
This piece reminds me of the time in high school (Catholic high school, natch) my best friend removed a slice of Oscar Meyer from her sandwich and tossed it across the table at me. She had to serve cafeteria duty and received a lecture from the Dean of Students which included this gem: “We don’t throw baloney.”
I also went to a Catholic high school and the only time I ever got detention was the winter when I got caught in the hallway by my locker when the bell rang for the start of the day – which meant the national anthem in English AND French, morning prayers, and morning announcements, so 5-10 minutes standing motionless with a giant down coat on. I was starting to get sweaty so I stealthily tried to remove my coat, but the Principal saw me and stalked over to me, demanding to know why I was being “disrespectful”. Even though I was the biggest geek at the time I showed the occasional glimpse of sassiness and probably said something like “Look, I’m sweaty, lady, leave me alone.” I ended up bawling in the (much nicer) VP’s office while writing an apology letter because I was missing a Chemistry test, all for trying to adjust my internal heating temperature during Our Father.
ugh, and I thought the pledge of allegiance at public school was bad…
Theoretical tool time! You got caught up in what is called the fraud triangle: opportunity, rationalization, and motivation. The cucumbers were right there, they were ostensibly out there for students to take them, and while you didn’t need them all for yourself, you needed them for the public good of throwing a fabulous dinner party. If any one of those details had been absent, I am sure you would not have been swept into the vortex of sin.
Thus can the fraud triangle make food thieves of us all. (c.f. the hotbed of iniquity that is an office fridge.)
Mr. Floridagal used to steal oranges and apples from the cafeteria of our Christian college. He would reliably have a minimum of 5 pieces of fruit in his backpack at all times-handy for late night studying!
Shit, at one of the colleges I went to we routinely brought (illegally purchased) beers into the cafeteria at meals. And broke into the pool to go skinny dipping every weekend. And didn’t wear clothes at half the parties. What are consequences???
This is so well-written! I can’t believe you had to go through all that for some cucumbers. When I lived on campus we would steal ALL KINDS of food from the dining halls. Once we staged an iron chef competition in the dorm kitchens using only what food we could steal/sneak/beg from the dining hall. One of my friends was able to sweet talk a half-dozen eggs from someone, to her great delight.
My friends once bought a medium fountain drink from the campus McDonalds and proceeded to fill the entire cup with ketchup from the dispenser. Why? Because we needed fake blood for an elaborate prank.
Also, every winter a whole group would steal trays from the dining hall and use them for sleds. They might have returned them afterwards; I’m not sure.
We were not at a Christian college, if you couldn’t tell…
You weren’t at an Ontario university, are you? Because if not, I’m glad to know that mine wasn’t the only university where everyone stole trays for sledding.
Not Ontario, but that was a thing we did at our university one unusually snowy year in the 80s. Later, the authorities built a rail on that slope. Later still, the whole area was massively rebuilt so that (coincidentally) tray-sledding was impossible. Coincidence, I’m sure.
I regret nothing.
Carleton? That’s where I went and we had this AMAZING hill to sled on…
Hah. I stole (or borrowed, pretty sure we returned them) cafeteria trays to go sledding too. This was in NE Ohio.
Pretty glad that my religious college was the liberal sort of religious college.* As far as college shenanigans go, this is nothing. As far as stealing food from college cafeterias go, this is nothing. I knew a guy who didn’t have a meal plan, so every week he’d buy one meal and come in with his backpack full of empty tupperware, including a large pitcher, and walk out with food for the week. I had an afternoon class with two friends who didn’t have time for lunch that day, so I’d steal half a dozen cookies two or three times a week to feed them.
But the way they made a huge, drawn-out deal of it, yikes. Here, have some sympathy; I have extra.
* Aside from in-class discussions of religion and one “let’s all stare at the Catholic!” joke (made in a friendly way), I never felt like the Lutheranism was coloring every aspect of campus life.
I feel like this is such a quintessential Christian-goody-goody experience. That moment where you are sick to your stomach scared of the consequences but also keenly aware of the absurdity of the situation. Spot on.
I also went to a small conservative christian college. This cucumber theft story is amazing and would have 100% have happened if anyone had observed me “stealing” oranges to eat later, in my room, using my unlimited meal plan. I think my favorite part is the letter about STEALING CUCUMBERS.
I really relate to this – in high school I was horrified when my friends and I “trespassed” (aka walked) into a public park at dusk. (The sign said “Park Closes at Dusk!”). My Rules At All Cost philosophy got completely shaken when I was threatened with expulsion from my school for the mere forwarding to another student of an LA Times article that suggested one of our professors was a terrible misogynist. (Speaking ill of authority was apparently libel.) There is really nothing that cures the desire to blindly follow the rules and be good like being punished for failing to follow very very dumb “rules” and having the breaking of said rules being blown vastly out of proportion.
You know who I hear was a huge fan of blindly following rules? Jesus. Just couldn’t get enough of strict adherence to the literal interpretation of every rule he could get his hands on.
I will be paying for all the cookies I ‘stole’ for eternity so I have 0 regrets (apart from taking out student loans in the first place).
“”But then I just went back to self-flagellation, as you do.” –> This might be my personal, post-evangelical motto.
“lured some neighbor boys into a big cardboard box and then sat on it”
Ahhhaha that’s amazing. I think you’re selling yourself short, sounds like you were an evil tween genius.
Man, they were lucky you weren’t bringing anything INTO the dining hall … like tequila … and combining it with Diet Mountain Dew to make “redneck margaritas” … not that I know anyone who did that …
When I was in college, I had an art history class that was at 2pm on a Friday, and it took me half a semester to realize that the Cool Greeks in the back two rows were topping up their Route 44 Sonic slushies with McCormicks Vodka under cover of the darkness required to show slides. Gotta get that preparty started early.
I desperately wanted to be a part of this, but my essential prissy nature denied me the satisfaction.
My college had super strict rules about taking food out of the dining hall, mostly because one employee really, really cared about it and would chase you down, but everyone just kind of made a game out of working around it. I stole multiple decorative vegetables I didn’t even want just to prove I could, and that’s the only thing I’ve ever “stolen” in my life. Good lesson in the meaninglessness of authority, I guess.
The tamest thing I’ve ever done that made me feel like a criminal was slipping into my own dorm without using my key by catching the door behind someone else who had just used their key.
I was a theater major, so I lived near the theater which also was rented out for conferences and weddings. Liberated boxed wine from a stolen mug totally helped me get an A in that existentialism class.
on the weekends, one section of our cafeteria would be given over to iced bowls full of yogurt and cottage cheese, garnished with flowers and whole pineapples.
After being dared to take one as a freshman, I discovered whole pineapples to be a beautifully large, ludicrous, and funny thing to steal. Plus – it’s a decoration! It’s just going to waste otherwise! I’m helping!
So, I stole a whole lot of pineapples that first semester and then eventually they just stopped using them as decor. Like, completely. I effected change!
I also used to bring a backpack pretty much every week of college and steal a fresh weekly loaf of bread.
edited to add: I always self identified as a “good kid” and yet never had any issue with stealing things. I…dunno.
I think there’s something about cafeteria stealing that doesn’t seem like “stealing.” I mean, it’s on your meal plan anyway, right?
Totally agree with this. My parents were paying a billion dollars for my unlimited meal plan, so I stole E V E R Y T H I N G from the cafeteria. Actually, I usually just stole donuts to eat during class. Freshman 15, what?
true, but now that I’m older and have run several regular events myself, I see that I clearly wrecked someone’s beautiful “flowers and fruit on ice” tablescaping fantasy pretty regularly. Like, on a weekly basis. which is kind of shitty on my part. and no part of that angle would have occurred to me at the time, so I have indeed perhaps grown up a bit.
You guys have made me feel so much better about the apparent ubiquity of stealing food from college cafeterias. Seriously, bless you. (But if you’re currently in school reading this and thinking about how easy it’d be to smuggle a pepperoni pizza out underneath your windbreaker, I SEE YOU. And don’t do it, you little dirtbag).
I also went to christian college, and I recall members of my floor stealing an entire massive bag of lucky charms by passing it out the window. I feel a LITTLE bad about being party to this, but the image of these women passing all that cereal through a window was just so priceless.
Did you go to a certain college in Yellow Springs Ohio too? I imagine there must be so many of us here in the Toast commentariat….
(there were srs consequences for not getting verbal consent i/r/t sexytimes, but 40s in the cafe line were A-OK. I loved those priorities)
My sister went to said school; I heard there were horrific things done to a melon at the orientation safe sex lecture.
Bagel theft is where it’s really at. Wear a coat with voluminous pockets, fill them with bagels, and you’re set for ages.
On an unrelated note, the school cafeteria switched to these abysmal quasi-bagels my junior year of college. So, sorry everyone, I guess?
When I was there (1981), we called it the “pledge” rather than the “covenant.” Had me worried for a minute there about my recollection powers because I was sure it must be Wheaton. Then I got to the “saga” part and knew.
BTW. It was a great story and lesson. Just noticed the last name on the Dean’s letter. I think I know your dad and grand dad. I was Wheaton ROTC and am in Colorado Springs now. Small world. My oldest, Peter, would have been at Wheaton when you were there.
Oh my gosh! Based on the timeline you mention, you were probably there the same time as my parents 🙂 I actually just moved from Colorado Springs (husband was stationed at Carson) to Austin a couple months ago. Small world indeed!
All I could think is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kGjSq4HqP9Y
Prime Time for Crime Time
Jewel-Osco… did you go to the Moody Bible Institute?!
“lured some neighbor boys into a big cardboard box and then sat on it”
Can we have this story next?
Haha, that’s basically the entire story. I had an antagonistic (read: secret crush) relationship with them (they were twins) that involved luring them to their front door and ambushing them with my Super Soaker. Also the box thing.
Senior year my roommate got a job on the SAGA dish crew on steak nights so he could bring back to the apartment some of the steak scraps from the trash that we would boil up into a delicious stew. Guess it’s not stealing if it’s from the trash?
I stole a teabag (Tazo English Breakfast) from my law school’s cafeteria the other day and felt SO GUILTY about it.
I stole a brick from my college (from the brick paths around campus, not a building) – I still have it, 20+ years later. I’m not sure why, but I think it was tradition – I went to a small liberal arts college where tradition was used to justify a lot of odd behavior. It’s a very nice red brick, with the name of my school on it. And I have absolutely no use for it now, but I can’t exactly get rid of it.
I cracked up at the SAGA pun. One sandwich and a piece of fruit is one sandwich more than they let us take out when I was there.
I was a RAGING bulimic in college and abused my small liberal arts schools’ permissive, all-you-care-to-eat dining hall to no end. I’d pile my tray high with desserts and sandwiches and ice cream and take it all into the HANDICAPPED BATHROOM, where I’d lock myself in for an hour or so, stuffing my face on the cold tile floor while reading literary criticism. I’d eat until it hurt and then get rid of it. I knew I was abusing the dining hall and abusing myself. I got strange looks from cafeteria workers sometimes, and some light shaming, but what was most painful was the undertone of concern I sometimes felt when a staff member would engage me in small talk as I poured yet another bowl of Frosted Flakes. A tiny part of me wishes someone WOULD’VE punished me more formally for my selfishness…but I also know that wouldn’t have “cured” me, either. Thanks for sharing…reading this makes me feel a little less “sinful,” and totally grateful that I never got a letter, even though I definitely deserved it.
Oh my gosh, I am so sorry that you had to go through that and I hope you are doing better now! And of course, what you were doing was not “sinful” in any way. What you mention about wishing someone would have stopped you is emblematic of what I think is the central problem of legalism: even when someone is blatantly NOT ok, if they are “coloring in the lines,” we often don’t intervene. Thanks for sharing your story.
This article reminded me of a similar experience I had in Catholic high school. A friend and I bought the largest pair of panties we could find at WalMart and gave them to another friend at school as a joke, and some pictures were taken of the three of us all wearing the underwear at once (OVER our school uniforms). The pictures were discovered by a teacher and we got in an ENORMOUS amount of trouble for it.
The school called my parents and told them I’d been involved in the production of “pornographic images” (my parents weren’t mad once they heard my side of the story). I got 1 and a half demerits (2 demerits meant suspension, and 3 meant expulsion) and had to attend after-school and Saturday detention for a while. We also had to write an article for the school paper about how taking inappropriate photographs could ruin one’s life. It was definitely a transformative experience for me in the way that I view authority.
Iceberg lettuce and celery can both fuck right off.
….Meanwhile, at Hippie Dirtbag College, we stole everything all the time from the dining halls. Not for banquets. Just for shits and giggles, and so those of us who were too lazy to walk across the street (ACROSS THE STREET) to the dining hall could eat cereal and milk without leaving the dorm. (Seriously, it was a whole production. Mason jars, tupperware, plastic bags, “ok fill up this glass with milk and bring it back to the table, then we’ll send someone else,” etc.)
I was the freshman who walked into the cafeteria early one morning and just asked if they had any spare birthday cake. My roommate got a full tray of brownies for her birthday. There may have even been candles involved.
Much obliged to you for sharing your stuff on site. It is without a doubt that we have comparable hobbies. Something are exceptionally useful to me.