A Layering Helping of Servitude: Students Represent The Restless and The Capable

@font-face { font-family: “Cambria”; }p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal { margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: “Times New Roman”; }div.Section1 { page: Section1; }

The student union cafeteria, where a lot of real world experience gets practiced has a cool, raunchy smell like a day-old trash bag that somebody just threw out, somebody with a sneeze—a smell like smelly feet you get after gym class, a grease smell, a smell like the inside of a bag of chips with filmy overtones provided by the stale-pieced chips pumping out a smell like banana taffy where they replaced the banana flavor with something that’s supposed to be just as good as a banana, except it isn’t.  Another galaxy, is what this smells like, like Kobol in the old Battlestar Galactica series, and the cafeteria, a floor above ground, is where the Cylons live, dormant till they step out of the resurrection baths to fight against the human race.

Chestnut-colored wood chairs. Portraits like the ones you see affixed to the walls of grandmas’ houses. Electroacoustics summoning the self-appointed students at a pitch so acutely pulsated that the noise could smash….not a beer mug…something bigger… maybe a beer keg.

Noisy. But mostly the cafeteria reeks. It reeks like rancid-raw compost for used-up soil amendments. It stinks… do self-appointed students have their own smell, like cooks with their garlic-infused fingers? Or is it the eternal volunteers being eternally toiled in the unpaid sector known as the real world?

The smell is one of the things that led on otherwise giddy student named Joe Schmo to give up self-appointed student work.

“The smell is a shade of lost hope and strain and horror,” he says, gathering momentum like a WWF announcer. “As the day goes on it ascends from the sector, the student union, and infuses the very cracks of the building until everything stenches with it, nothing is left unaffected.”