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In This Issue

• Letter From the Editor
• They Watch
• Alcohol.edu Valedictorian Gets Schwasty
• Student Spots Celeb and Doesn’t Flip a Shit; Friends Doubt Her Sanity
• Columbia College First-Year Picks Worst Chair in Classroom
• Columbiascopes
• Class Clown’s Unexpectedly Well-Conceived Joke Falls Flat in LitHum Class
• Tweets of the Week
• Black Friday: A Nocturnal Dad In The AM
• The First Danksgiving Miracle
• Santa Claus is actually Jewish
• What Do You Think?
• “A Rugrats Chanukah” Cures Anti-Semitism
• The Yellow Term Paper
• #ivyleagueproblems
• If You Tweet in the Forest, Does it Make a Sound?
• New Elder Scrolls Game Released “For Nefarious Pro-Capitalist Agenda,” Crackpot Says
• Dance for me, Millie
• How to Increase the Utility of Your Bathroom When You're Shitfaced
• Adventures on DateMySchool.com
• Decoded
• Ask Mark
• Heart2Heart “Facebook Official”
• Reviews of Movies We Haven't Seen Yet: Jack and Jill
• “American Horror Story” is Actually Crazy
• “Dance Moms”: Small Girls, Big Hair

They told me it was the best of both worlds.

They told me a walkthrough double at John Jay was a sensible choice, for a sensible student.

I’ve been trapped in here for hours, days, weeks, who knows. For me, time rolls by like clouds over the great plains. I have become a grain of sand in the barren world.

I have to pee, but my “roommate” stands between me and the hallway... and I hear a bed creaking.

Not just any creaking, either. I’ve listened to it for hours, run it through computer algorithms multiple times in a futile attempt to discern the rhythm and more importantly for my bladder, calculate when he should be finished. But he is relentless. Like death. The noise stops, but before I can act, they start up again. He has the stamina of Zeus. I may die here.

I started scratching the hours into the wall with my fingertips, because my laptop ran out of battery. My charger was in the other room. I carved time into the earth, but I lost track of it. Do I have a beard now? Is my hair fraught with grayness? If I look in my cosmetic mirror...is it my face that looks back?

All I wanted to do was write my sociology paper. 

“This is a smart decision!” I thought, walking back with my two liters of Mountain Dew from Morton Williams. “You’re saving so much over the vending machines! You are a genius!” The words had fallen from my lips like ash. All lies. Foolish, brutal lies—and I have the bladder to prove it.

I used to think he was cool, my roommate. We got along great. He liked baseball, and I liked football. We were like two peas in a pod! 

...I shouldn’t have said peas. 

Damn you, cruel fate! Damn you!

I can hold it in no longer! I can’t focus, I can’t move, I can’t see. The world swells around me, pulsates like a bladder gaining slow release. Would he see me in the dark? Surely it would be dark in there. I could slip out, quietly... as silent as his girlfriend. Oh, this must be the way! I shut off my lights... I slowly twist the door handle and pull it towards me...

But I still hear the dreaded sounds of woeful, damnable intercourse! Could I do it still? Could I come face-to-face with Mephistopheles, with my greatest fear—that of being a cockblocker? Do the needs of the bladder outweigh those of the balls? I had to... I lurched towards the widening blackness.

And do you know what I saw? Deep in the growing horizon of darkness, in the vague sound of breathing and creaking wooden bedposts that I knew lay before me... I saw myself. Younger, starry-eyed, hopeful. I saw myself from without and looked in my own eyes, my own soul, as if to say, “Is this what you’ve become? What would Jesus do?!”

I knew at that moment that there was something more at stake than urine, or climax, or the darkness in the heart of man. My very being stood at the crossroads of nirvana and physical desires. I had to put aside my worldly needs. I crawled back behind my door and closed it softly. The creaking continued. I knew I had done my duty.

I awoke to a knock amidst the chirps of birds. It was morning; I went to stand up, but realized that my pants were damp and frigid, and I had been sleeping in a puddle on the floor. “Hey man,” my roommate’s voice sounded through the unknown building material. “Is it cool if I bring my girlfriend over this afternoon? I slept at her place last night so you could work on your term paper without being distracted. Is everything okay?”

At that moment, I knew what had happened. I knew what I had become. I had won the battle for my bladder, but at the cost of the war for my soul. It hit me that I had heard my next-door neighbor, not my walk-through double roommate, and I wept. I wept for the end of innocence, the darkness of man’s heart, and for the fall through the air of a true, wise friend called Levi’s.