Welcome to MUWCI, and your nails are almost always dirty, there is almost
always mac ’n’ cheese cooking in your common room at 2 a.m. Courtyard
mattresses smell of dog piss. Your roommate eats pomegranates in the rain,
people on personal days ask you in the cafeteria, ‘Does language restrict the
scope of human thought?’ You look left on the way to the library, and the
mountains are a semi-colon to your exhaustion; eight people are dancing on the
courtyard slabs on Wednesday night and each has an essay to write, half are
folding in from the sheer weight of the bags under their eyes, but just eleven
minutes more, because what kind of time is 12:49 to leave, anyway.
Welcome to MUWCI, and Philosophy consumes your brain: does the ‘self’ exist? But either way, you have had to find a ‘you’ to present to three hundred people. What colour do you paint your walls? Do you care where your meat comes from? Forget to miss your parents. Feel guilty about drinking tea out of paper cups at college meeting, do nothing about it. Realise how average you are, use multiple metaphors of fish and ponds to describe it, continue to feel entirely inadequate. See your first two shooting stars on the same night. Turn pink at festivals, leave your clothes outside to wash in the rain, retrieve them a month later. Shower with two frogs at a time, flush a third down the toilet by torturous accident. Put your trash in the wrong bin, steal slightly expired butter from the Wada fridge, wear someone else’s boxers to brunch. Never miss Tuesday lunch. Never cook maggi with its own masala or expect pale pants to stay pale. Understand that Sagar Inn will not serve your food on time. Listen to the same twenty songs on repeat on Saturday nights, watch thirty people from twenty countries dance to them in the rain. Realise that it doesn’t really matter where they’re from. Realise that you’ve begun to recognise them by the slope of their shoulders, the stripes of their sweaters, the way their hair curls sideways when it gets too long. Smile at Kurt Hahn’s success, crack another joke about your Nigerian friend in the dark.
Welcome to MUWCI, and have you yet walked through a cloud? Do your neighbours play guitar sitting on their walls? Have you pierced your nose, shaved your head, eaten gummy-bears close to dawn? Do you curse PNC on Friday afternoons, know what post-modernism means? How many beds have you slept in? Why is no one ever done with their EE? Why the hell does shaking your hands beside your head mean ‘I agree’?
Welcome to MUWCI. Walk barefoot. Or don’t. Live isn’t an autological word. Do it anyway."
Welcome to MUWCI, and Philosophy consumes your brain: does the ‘self’ exist? But either way, you have had to find a ‘you’ to present to three hundred people. What colour do you paint your walls? Do you care where your meat comes from? Forget to miss your parents. Feel guilty about drinking tea out of paper cups at college meeting, do nothing about it. Realise how average you are, use multiple metaphors of fish and ponds to describe it, continue to feel entirely inadequate. See your first two shooting stars on the same night. Turn pink at festivals, leave your clothes outside to wash in the rain, retrieve them a month later. Shower with two frogs at a time, flush a third down the toilet by torturous accident. Put your trash in the wrong bin, steal slightly expired butter from the Wada fridge, wear someone else’s boxers to brunch. Never miss Tuesday lunch. Never cook maggi with its own masala or expect pale pants to stay pale. Understand that Sagar Inn will not serve your food on time. Listen to the same twenty songs on repeat on Saturday nights, watch thirty people from twenty countries dance to them in the rain. Realise that it doesn’t really matter where they’re from. Realise that you’ve begun to recognise them by the slope of their shoulders, the stripes of their sweaters, the way their hair curls sideways when it gets too long. Smile at Kurt Hahn’s success, crack another joke about your Nigerian friend in the dark.
Welcome to MUWCI, and have you yet walked through a cloud? Do your neighbours play guitar sitting on their walls? Have you pierced your nose, shaved your head, eaten gummy-bears close to dawn? Do you curse PNC on Friday afternoons, know what post-modernism means? How many beds have you slept in? Why is no one ever done with their EE? Why the hell does shaking your hands beside your head mean ‘I agree’?
Welcome to MUWCI. Walk barefoot. Or don’t. Live isn’t an autological word. Do it anyway."
Written by my beautiful roommate Safieh from Bangladesh for the MUWCI Times
