Students wait in line at 251 North.
Sometimes you want to be alone. This was not one of those times.
It was a Thursday. I had just come to the realization that I had not yet been to 251 North, the buffet-style dining hall on the campus, that entire week. The traditional meal plan gifted me one meal per week in 251 North, and because I knew I couldn’t go on Friday, I didn’t want to let one of my precious 251 swipes fall by the wayside. I proceeded to contact everyone I knew to see whether they wanted to join me.
As fate would have it, no one in the enormous group of friends I texted (OK, it was only three) could go to dinner because all (three) of them were busy doing homework. I was left with two choices: I could go to 251 by myself, something I had never even contemplated. Or, I could get takeout from a different dining hall and sacrifice one of my 251 meal swipes.
I knew I could potentially eat an unlimited amount of subpar food items, but was it worth the embarrassment of eating alone at a buffet? Is anything more sad than eating alone at a buffet?
Eventually, because I am an old miserly man, I came to the conclusion that I should go to 251 because it was the practical thing to do. I bottled up my pride and headed out the door.
***
Upon entering the dining hall, I saw large groups of students chatting away with their friends at long tables. As I made my way around the room to get food, I assumed everyone somehow knew I was there alone and was thinking about how strange and sad I was. In reality, if anyone had any thoughts about my presence at all, it was probably something along the lines of, “Why does that girl standing next to the pizza keep sighing melodramatically?”
After getting some food, I took a seat at a table of one, which, in a giant dining hall, is actually a table that seats about 12. This particular spot was occupied by five other lonely-looking students who, in an effort to compensate for the fact that everyone was watching them eat alone, were all trying to make it seem like they were doing something really important on their laptops. The guy with the headphones, the girl with the weird sweater — these were my friends now. I will never talk to them or see their faces again, but they still hold a very tiny and dear place in my heart.
My food was underwhelming and a bit bland, and, as usual, I ate all of it. The mac ‘n’ cheese was good, but I ate so much that it started to taste like plastic.
I refilled my bowl at the frozen yogurt machine so many times that I eventually just refused to make eye contact with the employee standing by the station.
At one point, I attempted to eat a piece of steak, but it was so tough that I had to spit it back onto my plate, as if I were a mother bird feeding her babies. I then waved at a young gentleman two tables over who had been watching me.
He looked concerned.
***
Eating by myself with virtually nothing else to do was a strange and fairly boring experience.
I counted the number of people in the room with backwards hats (five); I made a definitive list of my top three Beyoncé albums (B’Day, Beyoncé and 4). Plus, I found out how long I can balance a fork upright on my hand (four seconds, if I’m lucky).
In the end, eating alone at 251 North wasn’t quite as bad as I thought it would be. I didn’t make any new friends, but I also didn’t make any new enemies. I didn’t necessarily eat the best food, but I sure did eat a lot of it. I wasn’t with a large group of people, but I was sitting next to a machine that has (as far as I’m concerned) infinite amounts of frozen yogurt.
As I left, I even briefly contemplated going to 251 North alone again someday.
I probably never will.
