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In This Issue

• Confessions of a Dangerous Broccoli Head
• English Majors, Decades Later
• How to Spend Your Time After Co-Founding Apple
• The Cyborg Army of Death
• Salvation is a Prophet Away
• Chris Tucker to Play James Bond
• The Fed Point–Counterpoint: You Just Stabbed Me
• What Would You Do-ooh-ooh...
• Loose Lips Sink Credit Reports
• Bowling as Symbolism
• The Wonders of the Undersea World
• It is Imperative that You Spoon that Fruit Indiscriminately
• “They” Watch Reality TV, Drink Coke Blak for Fun
• Behind the Scenes at MythBusters Headquarters
• Good Night, and Good Luck
• Campus Bureaucracy Replaced With Rube Goldberg Machine
• The Seeker
• Tales of the Inexpressible
• The Most Trusted Name in News
• It Swings Both Ways
• They Watch
• The Fed Index
• King Kong Returns

John Krauss

It begins like any other Friday morning. I roll out of bed and into my slippers and say to myself, "What would today be like if my stomach felt like it was filled with the sorrow of a thousand lost souls?" To answer my question, I trudge over to John Jay, proudly ready to swipe. The swiper lady holds out her hand. My fingers slip into my pocket, past my cellphone, and then fumble frantically through my change.

There's nothing there.

There's an icy grip of panic that grabs the freshman soul by the scrotum when the owner of the aforementioned soul has forgotten to bring his CUID to the place of swiping. It's like the feeling Gandhi gets when he is stabbed by a beef shish kebab skewer in a Middle Eastern restaurant when he specifically ordered chicken and his crush is sitting at the next table. On his birthday.

Attached to the six calories I'd have to burn to retrieve my culinary carte blanche, I ask if there are any other options. I think I detect a slight grin on the swipette's face as she looks me in the eyes and says in a heavy Dutch accent, "Social."

I panic, the burial shroud of darkness surrounding me like blubber on a whale. A really fat whale.

I am the kind of person who doesn't even give my Social Security number to a hospital when I have to have a leg or an arm or some fingers amputated. But this is different. This isn't a hospital... hospitals don't have Wilma.

As far as I'm concerned, it's eat or be eaten by the bureaucracy of Housing and Dining.I'm not going to let nine little numbers and the precious safety of my identity prevent me from using meal number 12 out of 145.

"Yeah, okay," I say. "It's 2-8-3-" She presses three buttons. "1-6-" She hits two more. "9-3-0-1." I sigh the sigh of a man who has just revealed information most people bend over backwards to protect. I feel like I've been bent over in a different way. At least I'd get what I want-a meal at John Jay.

"I'm gonna need that one more time," the swipestress says emotionlessly. By this point, the manager has joined her with a Blackberry, and students behind me have taken out notebooks and pencils. You might think that after losing my security once, the second time wouldn't be so bad, but that isn't the case. It feels like I imagine my parents felt after losing me at Machu Pichu a second time.

In the end, I've given the Swipestapo my SSN four times-she was hitting the wrong enter key or something. Everything seems fine; the roof hasn't caved in like I thought it would, the furniture looks the same, and I'm still wearing my clothes. Maybe that Social Security doesn't do as much as I thought it did.

After eating what I was told was "Ethiopian Babaghanoush," I head back to my dorm. But something is rotten in the state of Columbia. I want to walk through Lerner to escape the cold, but all the doors are locked, and no one inside seems to see me. I wave to my calculus teacher as he passes by, but he sprays me with mace and throws the can at me. My phone vibrates in my pocket, but it isn't my ringtone and the man on the other end is calling for Aefje.

When I get back to my room, I am a little surprised to hear Trance music blaring from behind the door; my Indian roommate doesn't seem to be a part of that crowd. I put my entirely mechanical key into the slot and depress the handle. It doesn't open.

I go out into the hall to ask my floormates if the locks have been changed, but no one seems to recognize me-one of my suitemates even pulls out his cell phone and talks with quiet urgency to someone on the other end.

Before I know it, Public Safety is taking me somewhere-I think maybe to fix my key.

I'm wrong.

* * *

I'm writing this from the Dutch Embassy in Albany, where I'm awaiting trial for sixteen counts of involuntary manslaughter and simultaneous public indecency. I don't remember committing any of those crimes, except for maybe two of them. But then again, Wednesday was "Fun With Absinthe" Night at John Jay... I wonder what "190 proof" means.