Thoughts while sitting on the floor.

It is 4:01 pm on Tuesday, September 2, and I am sitting on the floor of 405 Barnard Hall. My small iced chai, which I waited for in a fifteen minute Liz’s line, is sweating condensation beside me, and my laptop is balanced between my folded legs. I didn’t get there late. In fact, I showed up ten minutes early, but every seat in the room was filled when I walked through the door, occupied by students who had apparently slept there or perhaps had simply never left from the previous semester.

This is shopping period, after all—that magical time when Barnumbia transforms into an academic version of The Hunger Games, except instead of fighting to the death, we’re fighting for chairs, space, and the basic human dignity of not having to sit cross-legged on the floor, craning our necks up to see the PowerPoint presentation.

Still more people are filtering in through the door like determined salmon swimming upstream, each new arrival met by the professor’s increasingly worried smile. They gesture aimlessly to the packed room with the helpless energy of someone trying to fit an elephant into a Smart car, expression clearly communicating: “Find somewhere if you can, and may the odds be ever in your favor.” The syllabus probably didn’t include a section on “How to Conduct Class When Your Classroom Has Achieved the Population Density of Tokyo During Rush Hour.” 

Registration is horrible and scary, a digital thunderdome where students battle slow servers, crashed websites, and the crushing realization that the class they’ve planned their entire academic career around has exactly three spots available. But shopping period? Shopping period poses its own unique brand of challenges.

People are over-enrolled, under-enrolled, and drowning in waitlists upon waitlists like some sort of academic purgatory. As a frequent waitlist warrior, I understand too well the desperation that leads us all to shove ourselves into classrooms designed for much less, creating a fire hazard that would make the fire marshal weep into his clipboard. We’re packed in here like sardines, the tin crushing us together snugly.

Speaking of crushing, I now have a cramp in my leg that feels like my circulation has given up on life entirely. My foot has gone completely numb, which is probably my body’s way of protecting me from the full sensory experience of sitting on this floor.

My chai has now reached room temperature, which is probably for the best since I can’t feel my legs anyway. The condensation ring it’s left on the floor will probably be the only lasting mark I make in this classroom, a small circle of moisture that says, “A student was here, and they were very uncomfortable.”

But here I sit, laptop balanced on my numb legs, typing notes about a class I may not even be enrolled in next week. Shopping period: where dreams go to get waitlisted, where fire codes go to die, and where students learn that sometimes the most valuable lesson isn’t in the syllabus—it’s in the humbling experience of sitting on a floor and pretending this is totally fine.

At least my chai is good.