Eating Ramen in the Rhetoric Lounge

I don't do it all the time. But it happens, and it's never a proud moment. For one thing, I can't shake the notion that I am not really invited in the Graduate Lounge for Students of Rhetoric and Classics. Certainly, I am using it less obnoxiously than the very loud cohort of undergrad Latin scholars currently fraternizing across the room from me, running in, running out, and saying things like, "Yo Nina, we should memorize the first part of the Aeneid together. I'm bored."

But aren't these regrettable characters a little more entitled to use this lounge for their incorrigible antics, being that they take classes in the sponsoring departments? Regardless, it's a moot point. They are eating healthy snacks. Fruit salads. Pita chips. Organic yogurt. Stuff you buy at the student cafe behind the stairwell. The special glass bowl sitting on the counter atop its rubber lid, full of my beef-seasoned broth reveals not only that I just used their microwave for a gross food that is probably produced by babies in the bowels of hell, but that I had planned to do this from the minute I packed my lunch this morning.

It is unlikely that anyone has noticed, you are thinking. Who am I, in light of sliced pineapple, Virgil, and a bubbling discourse developing the potential to get drunk between now and lecture, to captivate their attention with curled, clipped noodles now bloating like tapeworms in food dye and salt? Do they care that my cooperative home is stocked with beautiful lunch supplies? That I resorted to this because we ran out of white bread? Would they spend the second it would take to surmise that I filled the bowl with water from the women's restroom sink? Of course not. And who cares?

Just me I guess.