An apple a day keeps your floormates knocking on your door for more apples.

In the spirit of All Too Well (10 Minute Version) (Taylor’s Version) (From the Vault), this weekend I was sitting in the car, getting lost upstate. My idea of “getting lost” means going apple picking, and my version of “upstate” is Westchester. (Just don’t tell any people from Westchester I referred to it as upstate New York.) Though the leaves have not entirely changed into their lovely auburn and golden yellows and instead are still in their greenish-yellow phase, the sad girl autumn vibes were still very much there. As the bold beautiful Barnard woman I am, I bought a tote bag from the farm to carry my apples. My friends and I strolled along the rolling hills of the Hudson Valley and picked the reddest, ripest, and juiciest apples. Soon enough we had a tote bag full of apples precariously propped up against my refrigerator. 

So that begs the question, what do we do with all these apples? Well here is my carefully curated list of 13—yes 13 for Taylor Swift—apple-themed activities to get rid of your early autumn apple surplus:

  1. Hand out apples Oprah style. “You get an apple!” “You get an apple!” “You all get apples!”
  2. Put up a questionnaire on the whiteboard on your door begging people to take your apples. Yes, they will be hand-delivered. 
  3. Make baby jack o’lanterns with your apples and display them on the fireplace mantle that you have in your Brooks Floor 5 walk-through double.
  4. Channel your inner Gwenyth Paltrow and have an apple baby. 
  5. Go to your local Sulz Lounge and start whipping up a storm of apple-themed desserts Martha Stewart (BC ‘63) style. These include apple pie, apple sauce, apple crumble, apple juice, apple cake, apple muffins, etc. 
  6. Hand an apple out to your professor. I’m unsure if this is an actual thing people do or if this is just a coming-of-age movie fantasy. Either way, be nice to your professors or give them a rotten apple, but that didn’t come from me.
  7. Live out your Big Apple dreams you made when you got into Barnumbia, and literally create a big apple. Superglue your many apples together to create an overlord apple.
  8. Run through the pouring rain with a person you just met from the Bwog meeting who asked if he could have some apples after you pitched this idea in the Bwog meeting. Then hand him a large paper Trader Joe’s bag with three apples sloshing around in it. 
  9. Make shower shoes out of your apples and a carving knife and give them to the people that willingly walk around in your Brooks floor 5 bathroom without shoes on. 
  10. Science experiment! Leave them to ferment in your dorm in this tote bag. Soon enough you will have DIY hard apple cider! Maybe. I am unclear about how the alcohol-making process works. 
  11. Plant your baby apple in some soil in a mug that you have lying around in your dorm. Water it every day. Let it flourish in that warm NYC smog-covered sun. Is it obvious that I’m not a stem major yet?
  12. Test your hand-eye coordination. Place the apple on top of a trusting friend’s head, and then shoot arrows at the apple.
  13. Just eat them.

Now that your apples are all finished, you can go on your next fall fruit-picking adventure. Have a blast with all your new apple creations.

Apples via Bwog Archives