If you can’t find yourself, store-bought you is fine.

You are what you eat, or at least that’s what the old adage says. While that means you can be a JJ’s place burger or a Ferris dessert, to truly become your most authentic version, why not eat yourself? And if you’re a resident of most Columbia undergraduate residential halls, you can! By the magic of the unbearable heat that your dorm room gets to, you can enjoy fried first years, sautéd sophomores, gently boiled juniors, or steamed seniors! Yum!  

Ingredients:

  • A dorm room without air conditioning.
  • You.

Steps:

  1. Languish—or conquer—housing selection by getting a room, because that’s not even a given here.
  2. Brew your excitement with Pinterest curation and vision boards over the entire summer.
  3. Text your friends during the summer about their housing.
  4. Realize that during the previous spring you forgot to check your dorm’s amenities.
  5. Realize that your dorm lacks air conditioning.
  6. Shrug it off because it can’t be that bad.
  7. Move in.
  8. “Oh my god.”
  9. “It’s so hot.”
  10. “The air is thick.”
  11. Have your parents make passive-aggressive comments about your room.
  12. Have your parents take breaks in your floor lounge because it’s too hot.
  13. Bid an awkward farewell with your parents because you’re all sticky.
  14. Collapse from exhaustion onto your bed.
  15. Wake up to your body covered in sweat.
  16. “Is this livable?”
  17. “Two weeks can’t be that bad.”
  18. Remember the Frontiers of Science unit on climate change.
  19. Remember that time it was like 70ºF in November.
  20. “Okay, but does ODS really check if you’re asthmatic?”
  21. Rationalize that ODS fraud is problematic and also probably difficult.
  22. “Maybe if I set up my fan correctly things will be fine.”
  23. Set up your fan imperfectly.
  24. The room becomes hotter.
  25. Get cooked!

Me in my dorm room, fr. Also known as Execution of three witches on 4 November 1585 in Baden (Switzerland), illustration from the Wickiana (collection of Johann Jakob Wick, Zentralbibliothek Zürich) via Wikimedia Commons