It was my fifth class of the day, I’d had three hours of sleep, and needless to say, I was unprepared for my worldview to be shattered. It would turn out I had no choice in the matter. As I was sitting in my poli sci discussion section, dozing off and thinking about how cute my TA was, I noticed something about the girl across from me. It wasn’t her impeccable note-taking or the gum she had sticking out of her bag. It was her water bottle, adorned with many stickers.

A typical object…an atypical dilemma.

The stickers with which one decorates their possessions can say a lot about a person. For example, I have a Barnard sticker on my laptop, which reveals that I am a student there. I also have Glossier stickers, which means I’m basic. This girl’s stickers presented a contradiction the likes of which I had never encountered before and am unlikely to again. Circling the top of the otherwise uncomplicated Nalgene was a Columbia Spectator logo. Ugh, fine. But then, tucked away and surrounded by some generic flowers, was a piece of Bwog’s very own merchandise – the coveted “Fuck Spec” sticker.

To co-opt an overused phrase, I was shook. What was this? What did it mean? Who is she?  No, literally, I didn’t know who she was, despite being in a fairly small class with her for more than two months. But I was less concerned with trivial details like her name than I was with an analysis of her psyche.

It was like the classic chicken-egg problem: Was she on Spec and then realized the error of her ways? Or did she start out on Bwog only to fall for the promise of fancy journalism internships? Instead of principal-agent dilemmas, my mind was turning over the duality of man. If she thought Bwog wasn’t doing “real” journalism, then why turn to Spec? Did she miss the weekly grapes? Or perhaps she was affiliated with neither, and wanted to project some form of ~intellectualism~, but couldn’t decide which publication served the purpose better? Maybe we all have a Bwog and a Spec editor inside ourselves – or on our water bottles.