Sunday, October 31, 2004

"...some excess junk in the trunk."

"Most Chicago students contacted by the Maroon agreed that the average first-year does indeed put on the pounds. 'Most guys get a large gut and punchy in the face, while most girls get some excess junk in the trunk,' said Pat Rich, an undeclared first-year in the College." The paper quotes another student as saying "The 'freshmen 15' is true, even among upperclassmen." This does not make much sense linguistically, but I think the idea is, Chicago students just keep gaining weight.

This simply cannot be. It is physically impossible to gain weight your freshman year at Chicago, for these reasons:

1) The dining hall food is probably worse than whatever you were eating before college. If not, I'm sorry.

2) Frat parties--where beer is traditionally consumed to the point of weight gain--are big during Orientation Week but people generally stop going shortly after, and much O-Week drinking isn't, let us say, properly digested, because many U of C students' first experience drinking seems to be during O-Week.

3) Candy from many campus coffee shops (I'm looking at you, Uncle Joe's) is stale to the point of being inedible. If even empty calories are hard to choke down, what are you left with?

4) It's too cold to play outdoor sports, go for a jog, etc., for much of the year, but it's also too cold, not to mention to dangerous, to go out at 4 am to satisfy your junk food cravings.

As for the mysterious origin of the excess junk in Chicago women's trunks, I'm thinking it might just be in that first-year student's imagination, sort of like how I imagine that the guy studying nearby at the Reg is actually a dead ringer for Jeremy Irons, while nothing of the kind has ever happened.

5 comments:

Libby Pearson said...

What about the fact that that quote makes the quotee seem like a total tool? Junk in the trunk? Come on.

Anonymous said...

Is Pat a girl, a boy or a squirrel? Probably a squirrel, given the realities of perspective. Things always look worst when you're looking up.

Phoebe Maltz Bovy said...

Libby, you're right on.

Will (Baude?), I, too, lost weight first year, which I attribute entirely to the Pierce dining hall.

Maureen said...

Yeah, I've lost weight here the past two years--when you go from suburbia to a place where you actually have to walk, it's amazing how much exercise you can get. And backpacks filled with Plato and Marx make for good resistance training.

Nick said...

I agree with Maureen. the transition from suburbia caused me to shed some pounds I didn't need.

that said, I sit around "writing" all day and I can't gian weight for the life of me.

...sigh.